Prediction of Cervical Lymph Nodes Metastasis in Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma (PTC) Using Nodal Staging Score (NSS)

BACKGROUND: Cervical lymph node metastasis is commonly seen in papillary thyroid carcinoma. Surgery is the preferred treatment for PTC with cervical lymph node metastasis. There is no alternate ultrasound, neck CT, and thyroglobulin (Tg) methods to assess the occult lymph node metastasis. For moderate-and high-risk PTC, the number of lymph nodes to be dissected should be increased to remove the occult lymph node metastasis. OBJECTIVE: This study was designed to develop a nodal staging score model to predict the likelihood of lymph node metastasis in papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC), and further guide the treatments. Material and Methods. Data were collected from the SEER database. Patients with PTC from 2000 to 2005 were selected. The beta-binomial model was adopted to establish a nodal staging score (NSS)-based model. The NSS-based model was built according to gender, age, extrathyroidal invasion, tumor multifocality, tumor size, and T stage of the patients. A total of 12,431 PTC patients were included in our study. Various types of lymph nodes were examined based on various categories (incidence, risk assessment) to evaluate the results. RESULTS: 5,959 (47.9%) patients in the study were positive and 6,472 (52.1%) were confirmed negative for lymph node metastasis. The corrected incidence of lymph node metastasis was higher than that of direct calculation, regardless of the factors that affected lymph node metastasis. There were significant differences in the OS of PTC patients among the four groups and T stage (p is less than 0.05), indicating that cervical lymph node metastasis would have an impact on the prognosis of patients. CONCLUSION: In conclusion, an NSS-based model base on a variety of clinicopathological factors can be used to predict lymph node metastasis. It is important to evaluate the risk of occult lymph node metastasis in the treatment of PTC.. Since, this statistical model can describe the risk of occult lymph node metastasis in patients; therefore, it can be used as basis for decision-making related to the number of lymph nodes that can be dissected in operations.