Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Differentiated thyroid carcinoma (DTC) has an excellent prognosis with a relatively low recurrent and mortality rate, but a small portion of DTC patients suffers from an aggressive form of the disease with tumor invasion and metastasis. Accurate identification of this group of DTC patients is of crucial importance to optimizing individualized DTC treatment. This study aimed to retrospectively investigate the clinicopathologic predictive factors of cervical lymph node metastasis.

Methods: Methods is was retrospective study. Patients who underwent total thyroidectomy with central lymph metastasis due to DTC were included into the study.

Results: There were a total of 150 patients who met the inclusion criteria of the study: 134 women (89.3%) and 16 men (10.7%). The age of these 150 patients ranged from 19 to 76 years (mean 50.9±12.99 years). The age 45 years and less was the only independent factor identified using univariate logistic regression as statistically significantly affecting the well – differentiated thyroid cancer metastasis to the neck lymph nodes. Other factors such as male gender, ultrasound changes in the lymph nodes before surgery, more than one node in the thyroid and multifocal tumor were not statistically significantly related to metastatic cancer in the neck lymph nodes. After applying multivariate logistic regression model to these factors, it was found that the factors acting together, tumor metastasis to neck lymph nodes also increases the likelihood of only a younger age of patients.

Conclusions: Our findings don’t suggest to use such factors as gender, tumor’s size, multifocality as predictive factors for cervical lymph node metastasis. According to our results only age < 45 years could be a predictive risk factor for lymph node metastasis.

Keywords: lymph node metastasis, risk factors, differentiated thyroid carcinoma