OA: Response to the letter of Fagotti et al. regarding the manuscript: “Pattern of and reason for postoperative residual disease in patients with advanced ovarian cancer following upfront radical debulking surgery”

open access:
Response to the letter of Fagotti et al. regarding the manuscript: “Pattern of and reason for postoperative residual disease in patients with advanced ovarian cancer following upfront radical debulking surgery”

We thank Fagotti et al. for their interest in our paper describing the patterns and sites.

of residual disease (RD) in patients with advanced ovarian cancer who have undergone primary debulking surgery (PDS) (Heitz et al., 2016) in an expert referral center.....

Not a single chemotherapy trial would ever have been accepted if the dose intensity or protocol completion rate achieved had been at such low ranges similar to the low complete resection rates described in the NACT-IDS trials.

In any case, the fate of a patient should not depend on through which door she enters – Rome or Essen or elsewhere. Rather robust quality improvement criteria and strategies should be implemented in all centers performing this kind of treatments. Fagotti et al. have their merits by assessing the value of laparoscopy in this setting, our focus lies rather on other areas but nevertheless each of us has a small piece to contribute to the bigger picture.

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