MON-507 A Descriptive Study of Clinical and Surgical Characteristics of Patients with Thyroid Cancer: A 10-Year Retrospective Study from UAE

Introduction: Thyroid cancer is the sixth most common type of cancer in the UAE. It has been observed that the incidence of thyroid cancer has been steadily increasing worldwide. However, limited studies about thyroid cancer has been reported from the Arab gulf region. Objective: The objective of this study was to describe the clinical and surgical characteristics of patients with thyroid cancer in the UAE population. Methods: Retrospective analysis was performed on all adult patients attending thyroid cancer clinic at Sheikh Khalifa Medical City (SKMC) in Abu Dhabi, UAE over ten years from 2008 to 2018. All patients with a confirmed histological diagnosis of thyroid cancer who had surgical intervention with long-term follow up data on cancer outcome have been included. Categorical variable analysis and descriptive analysis were used to identify factors associated with increased risk of developing thyroid cancer. Results: Total number of 203 patients with confirmed diagnosis of thyroid cancer were included. Most of the patients were female (72.9 %, n=148). Mean age at the time of diagnosis was 40±13 years. Papillary thyroid carcinoma was the most common thyroid cancer observed (95.6%, n=194) followed by follicular thyroid carcinoma (2%), medullary thyroid carcinoma (1.5%) and mixed medullary-papillary (0.9%). Classical variant and follicular variant of papillary thyroid carcinoma were the two most commonly observed histological subtypes of thyroid cancer with prevalence of 54.7 % and 21.7 % respectively. 91.1% (n=185) of patients had total thyroidectomy and 8.9%(n=18) had hemithyroidectomy. Female gender has been observed to be associated with higher prevalence of thyroid cancer (OR 2.78, 95% CI 1.18–4.50, p=0.001). Smoking status did not show any significant association with developing thyroid cancer. Recurrent thyroid cancer was observed in 9.4%(n=19). Most of recurrence happened as local metastasis 89.5%(n=17). The mean time of recurrence was 24 months (range, 7–64 months). Conclusions: Our data demonstrate that in the UAE population, papillary thyroid cancer is the most common type of thyroid cancer. Female gender is observed to be associated with higher risk of thyroid cancer. Recurrence rate of thyroid cancer noted to be 9.4%. Further studies are required to investigate factors associated with recurrence and cancer free survival rates.