Chemotherapy in non-seminomatous testicular tumours stage I

Chemotherapy improves the survival rate of patients with disseminated teratoid testicular tumours, but patients without evidence of metastatic spread are not usually given further treatment after retroperitoneal lymphadenectomy because of the high toxicity of most drugs; 10 to 20% of these patients die later with widespread disease. In an earlier series of 24 patients from our hospital the survival rate in stage I disease was below 70%. Since 1973, when we began to use adjuvant chemotherapy in this group, there have been no relapse.