Endocrine Abstracts

Background and aim: Differentiated thyroid cancers are the most common endocrine cancer types. They are more common in women, but the prognosis tends to be poorer with men. We aimed to evaluate male and female patients with differentiated thyroid cancer.

Subjects and methods: This retrospective study was performed in last 5 yearly hospital records of our hospital. All data about the patients’ conditions were obtained from hospital information system (Probel) and we detected total 590 differentiated thyroid cancer (papillary and follicular) patients. Unfortunately four patients with a story of previously diagnosed metastatic malign cancer other than differentiated thyroid cancers and 128 patients with inadequate clinical data totally 132 patients were excluded from study and remained 458 patients were evaluated.

Statistical analysis: All results were presented as mean±s.d. χ², Independent-Samples t-test, and Man–Whitney U-test’ was used. P<0.05 accepted as statistical significant.

Results: Majority of all patients were female (n:390, 85.2%). There were only 68 male patients (14.8%). Mean age at diagnosis of all patients was 49.8±12.6 years and mean tumor size of all patients was 11.5 mm. Mean age at diagnosis (54.6±13.6 and 48.9±12.2 respectively, P<0.05) and tumor size of male patients was higher than female patients 13.5 and 11.0 mm respectively (P<0.05). Lymph node metastasis was detected in 40 patients (18.6%). Lymph node metastasis ratio of male patients (n:11) was higher than female patients (n:29) (respectively 16.1 and 7.4%, P<0.05). Distant metastasis was detected in one male three female totally four patients (P>0.05).

Conclusion: Differentiated thyroid cancers are common in females, but mean age at diagnosis, tumor size and lymph node metastasis ratio of male patients was higher than female patients. There was no any significant difference in the other prognostic factors such as capsule invasion, multifocality, bilaterality, and distant metastasis.