[Papillary thyroid carcinoma from tall and columnar cells]

The paper analyzes the data available in the literature on the morphological and prognostic features of the relatively rare morphological types of papillary thyroid carcinoma from tall and columnar cells. It is shown that the poor prognostic tall cell variant may be successfully diagnosed in the cytological smears of preoperative fine-needle biopsy and by histological examination of surgically removed tumor tissue. The question of the borderline extent of tall cells in order to single out the tumor as an individual classification category remains open. Columnar cell carcinoma poses great difficulties in making cytological and histological diagnoses. The prognosis of nonencapsulated tumors is poor as compared with that of encapsulated analogs of this variant.