Comparison of prognosis after partial and total surgical resection for parathyroid carcinoma: an inverse probability of treatment weighting analysis of the SEER database

BACKGROUND: Complete resection of the tumor and the ipsilateral thyroid lobe at the primary surgery is the “gold standard” for the treatment of parathyroid carcinoma (PC). However, differences in the overall survival (OS) of patients with PC who underwent partial and total surgical resection remain to be determined. METHODS: Data on patients with PC who underwent partial and total surgical resection were extracted from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database (2000–2018). The X-tile software (https://medicine.yale.edu/lab/rimm/research/software/) was used to define the optimal cut-off values for continuous variables. The inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) method was used to reduce the selection bias. IPTW-adjusted Kaplan–Meier curves and Cox proportional hazards models were used to compare the OS of patients with PC in the partial and total surgical resection groups. RESULTS: A total of 334 patients with PC were included in this study (183 and 151 in the partial and total surgical resection groups, respectively). The optimal cut-off values for age at diagnosis were 53 and 73 years, respectively, while that for tumor size was 34 mm. In both the Kaplan–Meier analysis and univariable Cox proportional hazards regression analysis before IPTW, the difference in OS between the partial and total surgical resection groups was not statistically significant (p>0.05). These findings were confirmed in the IPTW-adjusted Kaplan–Meier analysis and multivariate Cox proportional hazards regression analysis (p>0.05). Subgroup analysis revealed that total surgical resection was beneficial for OS only in the subgroup with unknown tumor size. CONCLUSION: There was no significant difference in the prognosis of patients who underwent partial and total surgical resection. This finding may provide a useful reference for the treatment of PC.