In the United States, the 5-year survival rate for people with thyroid cancer is an impressive 98%. This statistic has led some to call it a 'good cancer', but it is important to remember that survival rates are based on many factors. According to the National Cancer Institute, thyroid cancer patients have a five-year survival rate of nearly 98 percent and more than 95 percent survive a decade. However, due to the successful results of treatment, few studies have been conducted on thyroid cancer survival.
For people with anaplastic thyroid cancer, the 5-year relative survival rate is around 5%. It is important to analyze the limitations of our study. First, this is a retrospective study and is therefore susceptible to limitations of retrospective studies, such as incomplete data from medical history review and physician selection bias regarding surgical and adjuvant therapy; however, at MSKCC surgeons and physicians who treat these patients have many years of experience working as a multidisciplinary team managing several hundred patients a year. This unified processing approach will limit the selection bias present within the set. Second, sample size may not be representative of U.
S. and international thyroid cancer patient populations. MSKCC is a tertiary care cancer center with an international reputation for treating thyroid cancer. The quality of surgical treatment and adjuvant therapy with radioactive iodine or external beam radiation may be higher than that offered by non-academic centers and smaller institutions.
This may threaten the validity of our study, invalidating any extrapolation to the general population. To address this, researchers obtained external datasets from other international cancer centers specializing in the treatment of thyroid cancer (Brazil, Toronto, University of California, San Francisco and Sydney). This external data set consisted of 4551 patients, of whom there were 88 disease-specific deaths. Comparison of the age distribution of patients with CTD in the internal and external cohorts showed a similar distribution with a median age of 45 to 46 years (supplementary Figs).This external data set had different clinical and tumor characteristics compared to the MSKCC cohort. Despite this, researchers' nomograms were validated with agreement rates of 73%.
This indicates that these nomograms can be translated to other institutions and populations. However, one could still argue that there is still a threat to external validity, since these four external cohorts are also institutions with specialized high-volume thyroid cancer management. Therefore, it is possible that applying these results to the general population is not yet valid. A third limitation relates to the limited number of events. Even with the collaborative effort employed in this study, there were only 59 deaths in the MSKCC cohort and 88 deaths in the external cohort.
However, despite limited events, researchers' multivariate model converged and remained stable, indicating that the model's conclusions were justified. BACKGROUND Most patients with thyroid cancer have the cancer contained in the thyroid at the time of diagnosis. About 30% will have metastatic cancer, and most will have spread to the lymph nodes in the neck and only 1 to 4% will have spread the cancer outside the neck to other organs, such as the lungs and bones. Most patients with thyroid cancer have an excellent prognosis, even if there is spread outside the neck at the time of diagnosis. However, death, while rare, occurs mainly in patients who have spread cancer outside the neck to other organs. This study examined patients with metastatic cancer outside the neck to determine factors that predict prognosis.
Medullary and anaplastic thyroid cancers, which together account for about 3% of all thyroid cancers, are more likely to spread. The figures come from the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and Final Results (SEER) database, which compiles cancer survival statistics. Clearly, the 1-year difference should not move patients from stage 1 to stage 4 of the disease, reducing the survival estimate by 49%. Both researchers believe that the increase in thyroid cancer rates could be due in part to more advanced imaging tools that detect cases that otherwise might not have been diagnosed. Aschebrook-Kilfoy and Grogan also found that younger, female and less educated patients, as well as those who participated in survival groups, reported an even worse quality of life than other study participants. However, after age five, quality of life begins to increase gradually over time for thyroid cancer survivors, both men and women.
Cancers that spread just outside the thyroid gland have a better prognosis than those that spread to distant parts of the body. Patients with medullary thyroid cancer that has spread to the lymph nodes in the neck (N) have a 10-year survival of 75%. The thumb-sized thyroid gland is located at the base of the neck, in front of the windpipe and below the Adam's apple. It is important to note that all pathologies have also been reviewed by a pathologist with a special interest in thyroid cancer.
This means that the estimate may not reflect the results of advances in the way thyroid cancer is diagnosed or treated in the past 5 years. Both researchers hope that this study will demonstrate the importance of studying survival rates for people with thyroid cancer - especially since it may have better outcomes for patients than previously thought - but it is far from good. It's important to remember that statistics on survival rates for people with thyroid cancer are an estimate.
