Clinico-pathological Characteristics of Saudi PTC

Papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) is the most common endocrine malignancy and its incidence has rapidly increased over the past two decades. Although PTC carries a favorable prognosis overall, a subset of PTC patients present with aggressive disease and experience recurrence, leading to a poor prognosis. Therefore, identifying tumors with potentially aggressive behavior and increased likelihood of recurrence is crucial for therapeutic decision-making and appropriate patient management. Various clinico-pathological characteristics of PTC, such as older age, male gender, extrathyroidal extension, tumor focality, histologic subtypes, tumor size and metastasis, are known to be associated with aggressive behavior. We aim to study the clinico-pathological characteristics of 1600 PTCs and their associations with clinical behavior and outcomes. Our objectives will be achieved through the following aims:

1. the collection of detailed clinico-pathological data for 1600 PTC cases from medical records and creation of a comprehensive database.

2. to reclassify and re-stage the tumors based on the latest American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging systems and American Thyroid Association (ATA) guidelines in order to have a uniform notation for all tumor characteristics.

3. to analyze the clinico-pathological characteristics of 1600 PTCs and their associations with clinical behavior and outcomes; specific aim 4 will be to analyze the associations of clinico-pathological characteristics with common genomic abnormalities in PTC, such as MAPK gene mutations and TERT mutations.

The outcome of this study will provide a better understanding of the clinical behavior of PTC from Saudi Arabia and should have important clinical implications, as it could result in the development of new and better strategies for personalized therapeutic intervention for the treatment of Saudi Arabian PTCs.