A cross sectional study of expression of CK-19 in papillary thyroid carcinoma and its association with prognostic factors

Abstract

Introduction: Thyroid malignancies are the most common endocrine malignancy. The most common malignancy in thyroid is papillary thyroid carcinoma. About 80% of all thyroid cancers are papillary carcinoma thyroid. Papillary carcinoma typically arises as an irregular, solid or cystic mass that comes from otherwise normal thyroid tissue. Papillary carcinoma has a high cure rate with 10-year survival rates for all patients with papillary carcinoma thyroid estimated at 80% to 90%. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted from January 2018 to May 2021 in the Department of Pathology, Bidar Institute of Medical Sciences, Bidar. The cases included for the study were histopathologically proven cases of papillary thyroid carcinoma and its variants from thyroidectomy specimens received in Department of Pathology. Cases without proper data were excluded. It was a record-based study. We took 40 samples for the study. Results: Of the total 40 cases of PTC, lymph node metastasis was noted in 10 cases that constituted 23.8 %, of which 2 cases was follicular variant of PTC and all others were classic variant of PTC. Out of 40 cases of PTC, 39 cases (98.8 %) showed 3+ or 4+ cytoplasmic and membranous positivity for CK19 and only 2 case showed a negative expression. 3 out of 6 cases of follicular variant showed a 3+ positivity, whereas columnar cell variant, tall cell variant and Warthin like variant showed 4+ positivity. Conclusion: Through this study it is concluded that, both CK-19 and CD56 can be used together as markers for PTC including all its variants but CK-19 cannot be used to assess the prognosis of papillary thyroid carcinoma as no association was identified in the study between the expression of CK-19 and prognostic factors.