In Reply.—We agree with Dr Seydel and his quoted articles that adjuvant chemoradiotherapy is an important factor in preventing recurrences in patients with B2, Cl, and C2 carcinoma of the rectum and rectosigmoid. This type of adjuvant therapy has become our treatment of choice for these lesions.
Adjuvant chemoradiotherapy has been used with increasing frequency in the patients in our study, especially in the second group of patients in the "stapling era." However, it was used with approximately equal frequency following either abdominoperineal resection or low anterior resection and, therefore, did not seem to have a discriminating impact on the results based on the type of surgery done.
The purpose of our article was not to prove ways to decrease the recurrence by adjuvant therapy (as had already been done in the literature) but rather to analyze the changes in surgical technique on surgical practice and its subsequent impact