Poorly Differentiated Carcinoma or Extragonadal Germ Cell Cancer

Excerpt

To the editor: In a recent article Greco and associates (1) report a series of 71 patients who had at least one characteristic of their definition of the extragonadal germ cell cancer syndrome. Interestingly, the 13 patients reported to have complete responses to chemotherapy with vinblastine, bleomycin, and cisplatin or a modification containing doxorubicin were diagnosed as having poorly differentiated carcinoma, and no patient with poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma obtained a complete response.

The authors place special emphasis on the diagnosis using light microscopy and electron microscopy, but it is surprising that they do not report how many complete responders had