In the last decade, a startling number of publications about the node yield in resected colon cancer specimens and its influence on staging and prognosis have been published in surgical journals. It is not an easy task to follow the trend in this dense forest of articles based on personal series, hospital experiences, retrospective multicenter studies, and administrative databases. Some issues seem to have been properly established. The number of harvested lymph nodes is influenced by several factors. The incidence of patient and tumor characteristics should never be forgotten: it has clearly been established that the node yield grows with younger age, right colon location of the tumor, and increasing T stage [1, 2]. Ignoring these facts can lead to misunderstanding of the significance of the influences that most interest surgeons: the influence of the extension of surgery and the influence of the pathology reporting. Some authors prefer to allude to the ‘‘quality’’ of the surgery and the pathology, but, as I will argue below, I think the assumption that quality in surgery results from more extended mesocolic resections and newer methods for identifying lymph nodes, has not been properly established in the recent literature. The article from Sondenaa’s group is a refreshing contribution to this issue. Leaving aside the world of big numbers, they prefer to rely on the ‘‘real world’’ practice of three Norwegian hospitals and three different strategies for seeking an answer to the problem and to confine their search to a defined and specific aspect: the relationship between node yield and stage migration [3]. Beginning with year 2000, when common practice in the three hospitals involved doing an intermediate mesocolic resection and a standard pathologic study of the specimen and then analyzing the harvest of 12 or more lymph nodes, they compare these numbers with those obtained in 2007, after the hospitals had adopted different strategies: more extensive surgery in hospital A, no changes in hospital B, and more dedicated pathologic study in hospital C. As common sense would predict, they found a higher rate of 12 or more nodes in both hospitals A and C but no change in hospital B. However, contrary to previous assumptions, they did not find an increase of stage III patients despite the higher number of harvested lymph nodes. No ‘‘Will Rogers effect’’ can thus be shown, at least when a reasonable number of lymph nodes are studied. They did not study the effect of an increased node yield on survival, which is the second and perhaps more important aspect of the controversy. To this point, data are apparently contradictory. On the one hand, the Erlangen group [4] advocates larger mesocolic resections—the ‘‘extended mesocolic excision’’—and shows impressive outcome results with their adoption. On the other hand, a recent study from Japan [5], correlating the meticulous analysis of lymph nodes in resected colon cancer specimens including systematic hightie of the main artery, with 5-year survival of the patients, postulates that intermediate resections are adequate for achieving long-term survival and that extending resections to the origin of the main artery leads only to a marginally better result, and that only in patients with T4 tumors. Coming from Japan, where most studies advocate extended oncological surgery; this is a quite impressive result Sondenaa’s group announces forthcoming reports on this contentious issue, and I am sure they will be valuable contributions to solving this intriguing question. I will be anxiously expecting them. L. A. Carriquiry (&) School of Medicine, University of the Republic, Montevideo, Uruguay e-mail: lcarriq@gmail.com