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 recurrencefree 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.