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Updated: Oct 29, 2025
Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Visualization in the Treatment of Locally Advanced Thyroid Cancer
Published on: June 9, 2023
Distinguishing Benign and Malignant Thyroid Nodules and Identifying Lymph Node Metastasis in Papillary Thyroid Cancer
Zejian Zhang1, Karli R Reiding2,3, Jianqiang Wu1
1Department of Medical Research Center, State Key Laboratory of Complex Severe and Rare Diseases, Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China.
Background:
Biomarkers are needed for patient stratification between benign thyroid nodules (BTN) and thyroid cancer (TC) and identifying metastasis in TC. Though plasma N-glycome profiling has shown potential in the discovery of biomarkers and can provide new insight into the mechanisms involved, little is known about it in TC and BTN. Besides, several studies have indicated associations between abnormal glycosylation and TC. Here, we aimed to explore plasma protein N-glycome of a TC cohort with regard to their applicability to serve as biomarkers.
Methods:
Plasma protein N-glycomes of TC, BTN, and matched healthy controls (HC) were obtained using a robust quantitative strategy based on MALDI-TOF MS and included linkage-specific sialylation information.
Results:
Plasma N-glycans were found to differ between BTN, TC, and HC in main glycosylation features, namely complexity, galactosylation, fucosylation, and sialylation. Four altered glycan traits, which were consecutively decreased in BTN and TC, and classification models based on them showed high potential as biomarkers for discrimination between BTN and TC ("moderately accurate" to "accurate"). Additionally, strong associations were found between plasma N-glycans and lymph node metastasis in TC, which added the accuracy of predicting metastasis before surgery to the existing method.
Conclusions:
We comprehensively evaluated the plasma N-glycomic changes in patients with TC or BTN for the first time. We determined several N-glycan biomarkers, some of them have potential in the differential diagnosis of TC, and the others can help to stratify TC patients to low or high risk of lymph node metastasis. The findings enhanced the understanding of TC.
