Abstract
BACKGROUND: Despite having negative lymph node (N0) status, thyroid cancer (TC) patients can still experience distant metastasis (DM), which significantly impacts their survival. This study aimed to investigate the prognostic factors for DM in TC patients (N0) and develop a predictive nomogram model for analyzing the prognosis of TC N0 patients with DM. METHODS: Data collected from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database for 18,504 TC patients (N0) between 2004 and 2015 were analyzed. Univariate and multivariate analyses were used to identify independent prognostic factors for DM in TC N0. These independent factors were used to build a nomogram model to predict overall survival (OS) at 1, 3, and 5 years for TC patients (N0) with DM. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: This study examined the clinicopathological features associated with the risk and prognosis of DM in TC patients (N0), and successfully established and validated a nomogram capable of predicting OS in individual patients with DM. The nomogram is highly useful for the timely identification of TC patients (N0) at high risk of DM by physicians, enabling individualized survival evaluations and treatment for TC patients with DM (N0).