Static and dynamic prognostic factors of papillary thyroid carcinoma.

The two types of prognostic factors of papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) are static and dynamic. The following static prognostic factors have been conventionally adopted: age, tumor size, extrathyroid extension, lymph node metastasis, and distant metastasis based on pre-, intra- and post-operative findings. These factors are useful to decide therapeutic strategies for PTC patients, including the extent of surgery and radioactive iodine (RAI) ablation. However, even the combination of these factors evaluated pathologically postoperatively is not good enough at predicting recurrence in clinical settings. The dynamic prognostic factors of changes in serum thyroglobulin (Tg) and thyroglobulin antibody (TgAb) values in patients who have undergone a total thyroidectomy are important to evaluate the progression of carcinoma recurrence and to predict patients' cause-specific survival, regardless of their backgrounds and the clinicopathological features of their PTC. Dynamic prognostic factors are superior to static prognostic factors in terms of expressing the condition of recurrence on a real-time basis.