Altered Serum MicroRNA Profile May Serve as an Auxiliary Tool for Discriminating Aggressive Thyroid Carcinoma from Nonaggressive Thyroid Cancer and Benign Thyroid Nodules

Table 1

Demographic and clinical features of PTC patients, benign nodule patients, and healthy control individuals in the training and validation sets.

Variables	PTC ()	Benign nodule ()	Healthy control ()	value^b	value^c
Age (years)^a				0.744^d	0.941^d
Age group, (%)
<45 years	50 (50%)	41 (45%)	45 (51%)	0.562^e	1^e
≥45 years	50 (50%)	50 (55%)	44 (49%)
Sex, (%)
Male	23 (23%)	18 (20%)	18 (20%)	0.602^e	0.725^e
Female	77 (77%)	73 (80%)	71 (80%)
Tumor size, (%)
≤2 cm	82 (82%)
>2 cm	18 (18%)
LN metastasis, (%)
Yes	38 (38%)
No	62 (62%)
Multifocal tumor, (%)
Yes	40 (40%)
No	60 (60%)
TNM stage, (%)
I/II	77 (77%)
III/IV	23 (23%)

PTC: papillary thyroid cancer. ^aAge data are presented as the ^bDifference between the PTC group and the benign nodule group. ^cDifference between the PTC group and the healthy control group. ^dStudent’s -test. ^eTwo-sided ² test.