Arch Iran Med. 27(8):465.
doi: 10.34172/aim.27317
Commentary
Comments on "Effects of Patient and Tumor Characteristics on Central Lymph Node Metastasis in Papillary Thyroid Cancer: a Guide for Selective Node Dissection"
Hadi Raeisi Shahraki 1, * 
Author information:
1Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Faculty of Health, Shahrekord University of Medical Sciences, Shahrekord, Iran
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© 2024 The Author(s).
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Cite this article as: Raeisi Shahraki H. Comments on "effects of patient and tumor characteristics on central lymph node metastasis in papillary thyroid cancer: a guide for selective node dissection". Arch Iran Med. 2024;27(8):465. doi: 10.34172/aim.27317
Recently, Altiner et alpublished an article entitled above and showed that gender (OR = 1.22), tumor subtype (OR = 0.44) and lymphovascular invasion (OR = 2.59) significantly increase the odds of central lymph node metastasis (CLNM), while intra-thyroidal localization of the tumor is not significantly associated with CLNM based on the multiple logistic regression.1 However, these findings are doubtful due to the following reasons:
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The estimated crude odds ratios are not true for women (correct OR = 0.51), lymphovascular invasion (correct OR = 138.19) and extracapsular invasion (correct OR = 8.87).
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In Table 2, for not applicable ORs, 95% confidence intervals were reported!
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The negative values in the confidence interval of odds ratios are definitely wrong because the odds ratio is always positive.
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The adjusted OR for lymphovascular invasion is 2.59, but the 95% confidence intervals range from 4.47 to 7.9 which is impossible.
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In the multiple logistic regression, just one OR was reported for each of the quantitative variables with more than two categories. Considering a category as the baseline, four ORs must be reported for intra-thyroidal localization and two ORs for tumor subtype. So, the current ORs are not valid.
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The confidence interval of OR for gender ranges from 0.99 to 1.55 which contains one and cannot be significant; so, P value = 0.025 is not true and the correct P value is greater than 0.05, indicating gender is not statistically significant.
I hope this note shows some deleterious effects of inappropriate statistical analysis in medical research.
Competing Interests
Nothing to declare.
Ethical Approval
Not applicable.
References
- Altiner S, Kozan R, Emral AC, Taneri F, Karamercan A. Effects of Patient and Tumor Characteristics on Central Lymph Node Metastasis in Papillary Thyroid Cancer: A Guide for Selective Node Dissection. Arch Iran Med. 2022:25(11):730-6. 10.34172/aim.2022.115.