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Previous Volume 339:1642-1644 November 26, 1998 Number 22 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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To the Editor: The study by Liefers et al. (July 23 issue)¹ demonstrated the prognostic importance of micrometastases detected by the use of a tissue-specific reverse-transcriptase–polymerase-chain-reaction assay (PCR) in patients with colorectal cancer. However, certain issues are of concern. Only 192 lymph nodes were analyzed, an average of 7 per patient. Histologic assessment of lymph nodes in stage T3 colorectal cancer by Goldstein et al. has shown the importance of the number of nodes examined per specimen.² When 5 to 8 nodes were examined, only 31 percent of the specimens were found to have metastases, but when 17 to 20 . . . [Full Text of this Article]

References

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