Author's response to reviews Title:Prevalence, risk factors and characters of symptoms of pelvic organ prolapse among Emirati women Authors:

Q1. From the methodology section it’s not quite clear whether nulliparous women younger than 30 years old were “excluded” or “not included”? The total of 482 “who approached” (from the results section) – was this the figure after excluding nulliparous and pregnant women or before exclusion? If after the exclusion –than the nulliparous women <30 y.o and pregnant “were not included”. In other words, if 429 out of 482 women accepted the invitation to participate in study – it means nobody was excluded, all 482 met the inclusion criteria. Response: The 482 women are those who met the inclusion criteria. So nulliparous and pregnant women were not part of the 482 women. An extra text was added to clarify this point both in the Abstract and Methods sections (Line: 40 and 144). Q2. Also it’s not clear what the study population ethnicity is. Were these Emirati only, or Indians, Pakistani, Sudanese or whatever other different ethnicity attended as well? Response: As mentioned in the Methods section (Line 99), only Emirati women were included in the study. Non-Emirati women were not included as also suggested by the Title. An extra text was added to clarify this point (Line: 38 and 102). Q3. What questionnaire exactly was used? Was it validated or not, or maybe custom designed? Response: We used a custom-designed questionnaire. The first part dealt with the basic demographic data. The second part explored the obstetrics, medical and surgical history followed by prolapse-related questions. The questionnaire was not formally validated but some of questions were used in other studies such as the WHO subgroup, reference 17 (Line 238). In addition, and as mentioned in Line: 107-112, the questionnaire was tested and re-tested on a pilot sample to suite our population’s attitudes to discuss issues related to POP symptoms. Furthermore, and as mentioned in Line: 238-241, the use of healthcare providers to question the participants and