Papillary thyroid carcinoma
Papillary thyroid carcinoma
Updated: 01/26/2023
© Jun Wang, MD, PhD
General features
- Most common thyroid carcinoma
- Usually young women
- Risk factors
Ionizing radiation
Radioactive material
- May be Familial
- Diagnosed cytologically (fine needle aspiration, FNA) or histologically
- Usually excellent prognosis
- Indicators for poor prognosis: tall cell, columnar or diffuse sclerosing variants; vascular invasion; poorly differentiated areas
Clinical features
- Painless nodule or mass in neck or cervical node
Radiologic features
- Usually cold on scan
Pathological features
- Most important morphological clue: nuclear features including clear chromatin, inclusion, grooves, etc
- Solid, white, firm, often multifocal, encapsulated or infiltrative
- May have calcification
- Papillae or follicles lined by follicular cells with overlapping nuclei
- Finely dispersed optically clear chromatin (also called ground-glass, Orphan-Annie nuclei)
- Eosinophilic intranuclear inclusions (represent cytoplasmic invaginations)
- Nuclear longitudinal grooves
- Further classified according to architectural pattern and/or morphology of tumor cells: follicular variant, tall cell variant, etc
- Follicular variant
Follicular architecture
Cells with nuclear feature of papillary
carcinoma
Higher frequency of RAS mutation
Less mutation of RET-PTC, BRAF
Marker
- Positive for thyroglobulin, TTF1
- Negative for calcitonin
Molecular abnormality
- RET-PTC
- BRAF
- NTRK1
- RAS: follicular variant
Treatment
- Total thyroidectomy
- Radioiodine
- Thyrotropin suppression
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