RE: Pattern of and reason for postoperative residual disease in patients with advanced ovarian cancer following upfront radical debulking surgery

摘要

We have read with great interest the article by Heitz et al. (2016), and would congratulate with them for the effort in investigating technical reasons of suboptimal debulking in advanced epithelial ovarian cancer (AEOC). In this study, the Authors suggest that, because of a much longer median overall survival (OS) in complete/optimally resected patients, pre-operative identification of unresectable sites may help to develop adequate surgical training and to identify patients that would better benefit from alternative strategies. Their overall rate of patients unsuitable for primary debulking surgery (PDS) is 30.3%, including women primarily excluded from surgery and those not achieving RT ≤ 1 cm.