Hi Martin,
You can try adding the restapi.response_style=replies query parameter to your call (or if you are already using another value for restapi.response_style, you can chain them by adding a comma between values like this: restapi.response_style=view,replies). Adding the value replies to this query parameter tells the API to include the replies in every message. If you do this for a topic message then you effectively get an entire thread in one response. This page documents the restapi.response_style query parameter: http://community.lithium.com/t5/Community-API/bd-p/developers-rest-api?page=apiresponse#define
If you want to use a different page size for nested replies then for your top-level results, you can include a query parameter named nested.page_size (so, for example, you could use add these query parameters to your call: restapi.response_style=replies&page_size=50&nested.page_size=100).
-Doug