Endocrine pathologists are reconsidering whether tumors characterized as noninvasive follicular variant of papillary thyroid carcinoma (NFVPTC) warrant a diagnosis of carcinoma. A change in terminology would affect cytology diagnoses; thus, our aim was to study the preceding fine-needle aspiration (FNA) diagnoses of this group of tumors.
We evaluated the FNA diagnoses of a primary cohort of 72 consecutively resected NFVPTCs and the cytologic and molecular features of an additional cohort of 39 tumors that included both NFVPTCs and classical papillary thyroid carcinomas (cPTCs).
For our primary cohort, the preceding FNA diagnosis associated with the highest risk of malignancy was suspicious for PTC in nearly half (48.6%) of cases. In contrast to the majority of cPTCs, no NFVPTCs in our second cohort had papillae or pseudoinclusions on cytologic evaluation of the FNA specimens, and none harbored a BRAF V600E mutation.
If NFVPTCs were no longer termed carcinomas, this would affect the rate of malignancy of FNA diagnostic categories. Cytologic and molecular features could aid in identifying NFVPTCs at the time of FNA diagnosis.