Thyroid cancer staging and genomics

Kim et al. have published a very interesting article in World Journal of Surgery about staging of thyroid cancer and implications of genomic analysis based on patients’ age (1). The authors compared overall survival and recurrence-free survival with different age cutoff values, and they investigated the appropriateness of the new staging system at a genomic level. They studied 505 patients for the clinical information (low- to intermediate-risk papillary thyroid cancers with 28 recurrences and 14 deaths) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) data. They were able to show significant values using 55 years as a cutoff for relapse-free survival. Signaling pathway analysis revealed that patients above age 55 had differing genetic pathways associated with aggressiveness of thyroid cancer