ESPE Abstracts

Background: The incidence of paediatric papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) is increasing.

Objective and hypotheses: To describe the clinical and histopathologic features at diagnosis, and follow-up of paediatric patients with PTC at Children’s Hospital of Mexico in a 10 years period.

Method: Comparative longitudinal study. We included 22 paediatric patients with histopathologic diagnosis of PTC between 2004–2014, divided into risk groups according to AJCC TNM classification system. Descriptive statistics were performed, Student’s t test or Mann-Whitney U test for independent samples, Fisher’s exact test to compare frequencies and Kaplan Meier estimator for disease free survival.

Results: The 72.7% (n=16) were feminine; the average age at diagnosis was 11.68±3.09 years. The median time from onset of symptoms was 4 (0–60) months, TSH 2.45 (0.6–15.2) mUI/mL, FT4 1.15 (0.9–2.0) ng/dL. At diagnosis, the 100% (n=22) had increased volume in neck, 18.2% (n=4) symptoms of dysthyroidism, positive antibodies in 31.8% (n=7) for anti-TPO, 36.3% (n=8) for anti-Tg. The 50% (n=11) had a positive FNAB for malignancy. The 63.4% (n=14) were high risk and 13.6% (n=3) had pulmonary metastases at diagnosis. The main postsurgical complication was hypoparathyroidism in 36.3% (n=8). Persistent disease was observed in the 50% (8/16) at 1 year, 25% (2/8) at 3 years; 10% (1/10) had recurrence at 2 years. No differences were found among groups in the persistence (P=0.21) or recurrence (P=0.60). Disease-free survival was observed in 50% of the patients at 16 months, 13% at 30 months and no differences were found by risk group (P=0.77), gender (P=0.19) or presence of lymph node metastasis (P=0.77).

Conclusion: In our series of patients, clinical features at diagnosis were similar to those described in the literature. In our study, the high-risk group had a higher frequency of persistence of disease at 3 years, different to reported in other series of patients.