Histopathologic subtypes and features of thyroid papillary carcinoma

Thyroid papillary carcinoma is the most common cancer of the thyroid gland. In this study the histopathologic subtypes of papillary carcinoma and association between the prognostic factors such as age, sex, tumor size and stage were investigated. There were 33 cases with a diagnosis of thyroid papillary carcinoma between 1995- 2003 at the Department of Pathology of Inonu University Faculty of Medicine. The histopathologic subtypes, nuclear features of papillary carcinoma (nuclear crowding, ground- glass appearance, nuclear grooving, nuclear pseudoinclusion), psammoma bodies, lenfovascular invasion and lyph node metastasis were reevaluated in hematoxylin and eosin (HE) stained sections. The number of cases classified were as following; encapsulated 8 (%25), and the frequency of others were tall cell 7 (%21), follicular 7 (%21), macrofollicular 5 (%15), oxyphilic 3 (%9) and micropapillary carcinoma 3 (%9). All of the subtypes showed nuclear crowding, ground-glass appearance, nuclear grooving. Lymphovascular invasion and lymph node metastasis were seen only in the tall cell variant. The age of eases have ranged from 24 to 85 and mean age was 45±4. Mean age of cases were 45±5 in women and 56±7 in men. The most frequent variant was encapsulated variant (%28) in women and follicular variant (%34) in men. In pathology reports of thyroid papillary carcinoma, the histologic subtypes lymphovascular invasion and lymph node metastasis must be noted. In order to give an idea on prognosis.Key words: Thyroid papillary carcinoma, histologic variants, lymphovascular invasion and lymph node metastasis, encapsulated variant.