Cancer Management and Research (Sep 2018)
Young age increases the risk of lymph node positivity in papillary thyroid cancer patients: a SEER data-based study
Abstract
Jing Wang,* Jianjun Liu,* Huayuan Pan, Chenghao Jiang, Song Liu, Zhengzhi Zhu, Jing Fang, Xucai Zheng, Shikai Hong, Shengying Wang Department of Head, Neck and Breast Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of the University of Science and Technology of China, Anhui Provincial Cancer Hospital, Hefei, People’s Republic of China *These authors contributed equally to this work Introduction: Currently in papillary thyroid cancer (PTC), the correlation between lymph node positivity (LN+) and patient’s age at diagnosis is still inconclusive. The aim of this study was to investigate whether younger PTC patients had higher LN+ rates.Patients and methods: From the 1998–2013 Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database, we analyzed PTC patients with at least 1 LN examined. The patients were divided into 5 groups by age separately for each T stage: ≤30; 31–40; 41–50; 51–60; >60 years.Results: A total of 46,077 PTC patients were identified, including 8,386 (18.2%) patients aged ≤30 years, 10,971 (23.8%) patients aged 31–40 years, 11,646 (25.3%) patients aged 41–50 years, 8,596 (18.7%) patients aged 51–60 years, and 6,478 (14.1%) patients aged >60 years. In each T stage, LN+ rates were inversely associated with age at diagnosis, which was validated by multivariate logistic regression analysis (p<0.001). In addition, the subset of patients 30 or younger had the highest lymph node ratio compared with other subsets (p<0.001).Conclusion: We identified that younger PTC patients have an increased predisposition for LN+ regardless of T stage. This finding could help surgeons to select the optimal treatment for younger PTC patients. Keywords: papillary thyroid cancer, age at diagnosis, lymph node positivity, lymph node ratio, recurrence, Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End results
