Scoring can predict the course of low-risk disease.
Papillary thyroid cancers represent around 80% of all thyroid cancers seen in doctors' offices, and most present when they are small (a median 1.7 cm in diameter) and unlikely to have gross extrathyroid invasion (less than 15%).
While 40% of patients will have positive regional lymph nodes, only 2% will have distant metastasis.
This is in contrast to follicular thyroid cancer, the next most common type, which is found in older patients who often have larger tumors (average of 3.5 cm), and that has a 25-year mortality rate that is six times higher.
At the Mayo Clinic, we have used our database of 2,512 ...