Cellular cohesiveness in benign and malignant thyroid follicular tumours varies significantly, but the difference is not useful in diagnosis of individual cases
2012
Abstract
The aim of our study was to search for new, readily available and statistically reliable cytological markers for differentiating benign and malignant follicular thyroid neoplasms pre-operatively. Although we demonstrated on the cohort of 58 cases (48 follicular adenomas, 10 follicular carcinomas) a statistically significant difference in cell cohesion, these could not be distinguished in the clinical setting because the specificity was too low.
The absence of correlation of cellular cohesiveness with E-cadherin expression indicates that other factors are probably responsible for the loss of cohesiveness observed in follicular thyroid malignancy.