The impact of sex disparities on the clinical behavior and prognosis of thyroid cancer

On behalf of all the contributing authors, I would like to express our sincere appreciation of your constructive comments (1). Sex disparity in disease incidence, progression, and prognosis has been observed in a variety of different tumors (2). In general, men have a higher incidence of cancer than women, but the prognosis is reversed (3,4). One remarkable exception is the papillary thyroid cancer, the incidence of papillary thyroid cancer is significantly higher in women than in men (5), and the associated causes of these differences are not fully understood. This study aimed to determine the characteristics of female and male thyroid cancer, and compare their clinical behavior and survival via using the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database. Our study revealed that male patients had larger tumors and higher tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) stage. Moreover, male patients had a prognostic factor for poorer overall survival (OS) and cancer-specific survival (CSS). Additionally, this study also showed that male and female patients had different prognostic risk factors. However, the current article has some problems as described by the authors. We miswrote millimeters as centimeters and are very sorry for our incorrect writing, thank you for your correction. As for patients’ age, the 8^th edition of the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) TNM staging system raised age cutoff value from 45 to 55 years based on multiple population-based studies (6,7), and 55 years as the cutoff value was more robust to achieve better predictability for CSS (8,9). Therefore, we choose 55 years as the cutoff value to validate the prognosis in female and male thyroid patients. Although the 7^th TNM staging for all patients in this study, it does not mean that analysis the clinical features and prognosis must be used 45 years as the cutoff value. At last, thanks for your enthusiasm for our article.

Acknowledgments

Funding: None.

Footnote

Provenance and Peer Review: This article was commissioned by the editorial office, Gland Surgery. The article did not undergo external peer review.

Conflicts of Interest: The author has completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at https://gs.amegroups.com/article/view/10.21037/gs-2023-01/coif). The author has no conflicts of interest to declare.

Ethical Statement: The author is accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Open Access Statement: This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits the non-commercial replication and distribution of the article with the strict proviso that no changes or edits are made and the original work is properly cited (including links to both the formal publication through the relevant DOI and the license). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

References

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