BRAF‐positive Multifocal and Unifocal Papillary Thyroid Cancer Show Different mRNA Expressions

Summary

Objective

Thyroid cancer is the most common malignant endocrine tumor, and its incidence has continuously increased worldwide over the past three decades. We focused on the association of multifocal PTC with mRNA expression to characterize how molecular and histopathologic features relate to multifocality.

Design

A retrospective cohort study.

Patients

The primary and processed data were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas. Total 490 patients were included in this study.

Methods

The statistical significance of differences in sex, age, histology, LN metastasis, and recurrence were analyzed using chi‐squared test. To identify differentially expressed genes between BRAF (+) multifocal and unifocal PTCs and between BRAF (‐) multifocal and unifocal PTCs, we used the Significance Analysis of Microarray. Over‐representation analysis is conducted using CPDB.

Results

237 patients had BRAF (+) PTCs, whereas 253 had BRAF (‐) PTCs. There were 110 patients with multifocal PTCs and 127 with unifocal PTCs in the BRAF (+) group and 116 patients with multifocal PTCs and 137 with unifocal PTCs in the BRAF (‐) group. In BRAF (+) group, multifocal PTCs had increased expression of 158 mRNAs as compared to that in unifocal PTCs. 10 mRNAs were involved in Wnt‐related pathways and 7 mRNAs were included in pluripotency‐related pathways.

Conclusion

Multifocal PTCs have higher expression of mRNAs in Wnt‐ and pluripotency‐related pathways when BRAF mutation is present. This might be the mechanism that accounts for the difference between multifocal and unifocal PTCs.

This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

http://bit.ly/2TjWKQf