Systemic Therapy for Patients with HER2-Positive Breast Cancer and Brain Metastases: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The review and metaanaylsis gives a soundoverview of current studies on systemic treatment of metastatic breast cancer with brain metastases. It shares a helpful insight into different treatment options and, overall, delivers an impression of the many difficulties inherent to such analysis, e.g. heterogeneity of studies, multiple forms of bias due to retrospective nature of most analysis etc. This revierwer appreciates the  presentation of the data, especially in figure 2 enabling the reader to get an impression of the degree of bias of the discussed papers. Very helpful!

I just  have a minor suggestion.

Include the following citation in the introductory part: Witzel et al Eur J Cancer 2018. Tretament an doutcomes of patients in the brain metastases in breast cancer network registry.

Author Response

Thanks a lot for your time in reviewing our article. As suggested we have added the citation of Witzel et al. (Eur J Cancer; 2018) to the introduction of the manuscript.

Greetings Inge Werter

Reviewer 2 Report

I thank the authors for this well-organized paper.

However, despite the rigor in methodology, the conclusions lack due to the low number of patients and the heterogeneity of the analyzed studies.

I suggest improving the conclusions with  future hypothesis and practice-based suggestions.

Author Response

We thank you for your time and appreciation of our manuscript. We have improved the conclusions of our manuscript by incorporating  practice-based suggestions and future prospects.

Greetings Inge Werter