An Approach to Macroscopic Central Lymph Nodes Detected during Surgery in Patients with Thyroid Micropapillary Carcinoma: Should We Resort to Dissection?

Table 3

Further analyses of the patient group who underwent total thyroidectomy + CLND (). Patients are subdivided into two groups according to metastatic status in the CNLD specimen. Comparison of age, gender, and tumor multicentricity; presence of lymphocytic thyroiditis; tumor size; number of nodules; and the number of lymph nodes removed was performed between the groups.

	Metastases
	Absent ()	Present ()
Age (median, range)	42.0 y (25–60 y)	37.0 y (27–69 y)
Gender
Female (n, %)	31 (77.5%)	9 (22.5%)
Male (n, %)	12 (75.0%)	4 (25.0%)
Multicentricity
No (n, %)	34 (79.1%)	9 (20.9%)
Yes (n, %)	9 (69.2%)	4 (30.8%)
Lymphocytic thyroiditis
Absent (n, %)	19 (63.3%)	11 (36.7%)
Present (n, %)	24 (92.3%)	2 (7.7%)
Tumor size (median, range)	8 (2–10) mm	9 (5–10) mm
Number of nodules (median, range)	1.0 (1–5)	1 (1‐2)
Number of lymph nodes removed (median, range)	6 (1–6)	7 (6–17)

p values obtained from the Mann–Whitney U test; p values obtained from Fisher’s exact test.