In Reply.—There are a number of points in DeSanto's letter that require comment.
We are unsure of DeSanto's intent in commenting on the selection of patients described in our article.1 Our article concerned early supraglottic carcinoma that we defined as stage T1 and T2 NO MO, and we naturally sought to compare patients so staged on clinical examination with those similarly staged and categorized in other reports. At no point did we state that "patients who in the beginning do not do well with irradiation are excluded and placed in a separate category," and in fact we did not do this.
2.
The confusion about the number of patients in the Mayo Clinic series with positive neck nodes arose from our misinterpretation of the statement by Coates et al2 "that the 71 patients with NO cervical nodes clinically who were treated by initial neck dissection included two who at operation