Age-Associated Mortality Risk in Papillary Thyroid Cancer: Does BRAF Make a Real Difference?

• Autor(a) principal: Miguel Melo
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Outros Autores: Adriana Gaspar da Rocha, Gustavo Cancela e Penna, Manuel Sobrinho Simões, Paula Soares
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/43732
• topic: Risco de Mortalidade; Câncer Papilífero de Tireoide; BRAF

The study by Shen et al1 recently published in Journal of Clinical Oncology, together with the accompanying editorial by Haymart,2 described the results of a large multicentric series of patients with papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC). Shen et al tested whether age at diagnosis, a well-recognized predictor of poor outcome, especially disease-specific mortality, maintains its predictive value after controlling for the most frequent genetic alteration in PTC, the BRAF V600E mutation. They found that the age-associated mortality risk was present only in patients with tumors harboring the BRAF mutation, and they claimed that these findings will have a major impact on the clinical management of patients with PTC. Considering that the overall frequency of this mutation is 45% and the disease-specific mortality is quite low in the group of patients with wild-type BRAF, older patients with wild-type BRAF tumors could be spared from aggressive treatment procedures.