Enemy Beyond the Wall: Clinicopathological Features of Intrathyroidal Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma (T1-T3a) That Metastasize to Lymph Nodes Without Extrathyroidal Extension

Abstract

The aim of this study was to determine the clinicopathological features of papillary thyroid carcinomas (PTC) without extrathyroidal extension (ETE) and with lymph node metastasis (LNM). PTC > 1 cm increased the risk of LNM by 2.161 times compared to papillary thyroid microcarcinoma. The risk increased by 3.774 times in males and 1.553 times in the presence of multifocality. Presence of vascular invasion (VI) increased the risk of LNM by 3.093 times in patients without capsular invasion (CI). Clinicians should be careful about possible LNM in patients with large primary tumor diameter, multifocal tumors, CI and VI.

Keywords:

• Papillary thyroid carcinoma
• extrathyroidal extension
• lymph node metastasis
• multifocality
• vascular invasion

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Author contributions

Abbas Ali Tam: Study design, analysis, data interpretation, and writing of the manuscript. Nurcan Ince: Data collection and writing of the manuscript. Husniye Baser: Data collection and writing of the manuscript. Aysegul Aksoy Altinboga: Data collection and writing of the manuscript. Mehmet Kılıc: Data collection and writing of the manuscript. Oya Topaloglu: Data collection and writing of the manuscript. Didem Ozdemir: Study design, data collection, analysis, data interpretation, and writing of the manuscript. Afra Alkan: Formal analysis, methodology, data collection, and writing of the manuscript. Reyhan Ersoy: Study design, data collection, and writing of the manuscript. Bekir Cakır: Study design, data collection and writing of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.