Association Between a History of Breast Cancer and Decreased Thyroid Cancer-specific Mortality

Abstract

Context: The clinical relevance of the well-known association between thyroid cancer (TC) and breast cancer (BC) remains to be further defined.

Objective: This work aimed to investigate the effect of history of BC on the prognosis of TC.

Methods: This was a comparative cohort study of tumor behaviors and TC-specific mortality in 5598 patients with papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) and 604 patients with follicular thyroid cancer (FTC), all with a history of BC (TC-BC patients), and their propensity score-matched TC patients without a history of BC (TCnoBC patients) in Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) 18. The main outcome measure was TC-specific mortality.

Results: Lower TC distant metastasis rates of 2.4% vs 3.0% in PTC and 6.1% vs 9.1% in FTC and TC-specific mortality rates of 1.3% vs 2.6% in PTC and 5.8% vs 8.4% in FTC were found in TC-BC patients vs matched TCnoBC patients (all P < .05). Comparing TC-BC patients with matched TCnoBC patients, hazard ratios (HRs) for mortality were 0.472 (95% CI, 0.370-0.601) in PTC and 0.656 (95% CI, 0.461-0.934) in FTC (all P < .05). Such HRs for mortality in PTC were 0.397 (95% CI, 0.268-0.588; P < .001) when TC occurred before BC vs 0.607 (95% CI, 0.445-0.827; P = .002) when BC occurred before TC.

Conclusion: This study demonstrates a robust protective effect of a history of BC on TC-specific patient survival, which has strong implications for more precise prognostication of TC in such patients.

Keywords: breast cancer; mortality; prognosis; thyroid cancer.