The Effect of Hemithyroidectomy in Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma with an Exclusive Involvement of the Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve: A Retrospective Study with a Propensity Score-Matched Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Involvement of the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) in papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) is an important prognostic factor and is associated with a higher risk of recurrence. This study aimed to retrospectively analyze the outcomes of patients treated with hemithyroidectomy (HT) in PTC patients with an exclusive RLN invasion who could not tolerate staged surgery, did not wish to undergo another operation, or had other reasons. Methods: A retrospective review was conducted on 163 patients with PTC and exclusive RLN involvement at our institution between 2013 and 2019. Patients were divided into a total thyroidectomy (TT) group and HT group. The clinicopathologic factors and prognostic outcomes were compared between the two groups. A propensity score-matched analysis was carried out to reduce selection bias, with the following covariates: gender, age, tumor size, multifocality, central lymph node metastasis (CLNM), and RLN resection. The Kaplan–Meier method was used for a comparison of recurrence outcomes. Results: In the baseline data of the 163 PTC patients, tumor size (p < 0.001), multifocality (p = 0.011), CLNM (p < 0.001), and RLN resection (p < 0.008) in the TT and HT groups differed significantly, whereas age and gender did not differ between the two groups. The TT group reported significantly higher temporary and permanent hypoparathyroidism than the HT group (p < 0.001 and p = 0.042, respectively). With 72-month median follow-up, 11 (6.7%) patients developed recurrence. After propensity score matching, 24 patients with HT and 43 patients with TT were included. Recurrence-free survival (RFS) in the matched samples showed no difference between the TT and HT groups (p = 0.092). Conclusion: Our results indicate that HT may be a feasible treatment for PTC patients with exclusive RLN involvement in specific circumstances without significantly increasing the risk of recurrence. Performing a thorough preoperative examination is crucial to exclude multifocal tumors and lymph node metastasis before undergoing HT.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".