Papillary thyroid microcarcinoma in super obese patient

ABSTRACT Papillary thyroid microcarcinoma (PTMC) typically has an indolent behavior with a good prognosis but is not always completely harmless. Surgical treatment vary from thyroid lobectomy to total thyroidectomy eventually associated with lymph node dissection and radioiodotherapy. The ability to identify patients with aggressive PTMCs from the majority of low risk patients is critical to planning proper clinical management. Several studies don’t report any statistically significant differences about recurrence and mortality among patients undergone to lobectomy and patients undergone to total thyroidectomy. Recently, higher body mass index (BMI) has been associated with aggressive pathologic features of papillary thyroid carcinoma. For differentiated thyroid cancers, an elevated BMI has been linked to a higher incidence of thyroid cancer in some cohorts.The risk factors for a more aggressiveness of PTMC don’t yet clearly defined such as their biological features enable to condition the surgical treatment. In order to elucidate the precise mechanism contributing to the relationship between obesity and thyroid cancer aggressiveness, future studies must be performed.