In order to assess the main clinical factors predicting extracapsular spread (ECS) in neck lymph nodes of patients with laryngeal cancer, step-wise logistic regression (LR) was applied to data retrospectively obtained from 141 patients surgically treated. Thirty six variables were evaluated in each patient. One hundred twenty eight out of the 141 patients had complete information on the 36 variables studied. With data from these 128 patients a linear discriminant function was obtained with an overall accuracy of 65.4%. The rate of correct prediction was 60.8% for presence of ECS and 71.7% for absence of ECS. Only 3 secondary variables created out of the 36 employed for the analysis were necessary to obtain these results.