JOURNAL WATCH Comparison of Lobectomy vs Total Thyroidectomy for Intermediate-risk Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma with Lymph Node Metastasis Spandana Jagannath 1 , Sabaretnam Mayilvaganan 2 Keywords: Endocrine cancer, Endocrine surgery, Papillary thyroid carcinoma. Indian Journal of Endocrine Surgery and Research (2023): 10.5005/jp-journals-10088-11208 Dear Editor, We read with interest the articles by Xu et al., 1 ‘Comparison of Lobectomy vs Total Thyroidectomy for Intermediate-Risk Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma with Lymph Node Metastasis’ and its invited commentary by Mulder and Duh 2 and we discussed it in our department Journal Club. We acknowledge both authors for their efforts to bring forth a relevant issue of de-escalation of surgical treatment in papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) which is indeed an indolent disease with a good prognosis. 3,4 We recommend this article to members of Indian Association of Endocrine Surgeons (IAES). This study has gone up and beyond the confines of the guidelines laid down by the American Thyroid Association on the management of Intermediate Risk PTC. 5 This is the largest cohort till today and the use of propensity score matching aids in its retrospective, non-randomized study analysis. However, it provides only level II evidence and will need further prospective randomized controlled trials for validation. We have some observations which might interest future readers. Aggressive histological variants which are classified as intermediate- risk PTC have been excluded from this study. Would that have influenced the recurrence-free survival and disease-specific survival rates? In developing countries like India, how feasible would it be to opt for a less aggressive surgical approach with more intensive follow-up and surveillance? Are similar favorable rates a possibility in resource-poor countries? We would request comments of IAES members. O RCID Sabaretnam Mayilvaganan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2621- 394X R EFERENCES 1. Xu S, Huang H, Huang Y, et al. Comparison of lobectomy vs total thyroidectomy for intermediate-risk papillary thyroid carcinoma with lymph node metastasis. JAMA Surg 2023;158(1):73–79. DOI: 10.1001/ jamasurg.2022.5781. 2. Mulder MB, Duh Q. Is lobectomy as effective as total thyroidectomy in treating patients with intermediate-risk papillary thyroid carcinoma with lateral lymph node metastasis? JAMA Surg 2023;158(1):80. DOI: 10.1001/jamasurg.2022.5790. 3. Powers AE, Marcadis AR, Lee M, et al. Changes in Trends in Thyroid Cancer Incidence in the United States, 1992 to 2016. JAMA 2019;322(24):2440–2441. DOI: 10.1001/jama.2019.18528.  4. Ito Y, Miyauchi A, Kihara M, et al. Overall survival of papillary thyroid carcinoma patients: A single-institution long-term follow-up of 5897 patients. World J Surg 2018;42(3):615–622. DOI: 10.1007/s00268-018- 4479-z. 5. Haugen BR, Alexander EK, Bible KC, et al. 2015 American thyroid association management guidelines for adult patients with thyroid nodules and differentiated thyroid cancer: The American thyroid association guidelines task force on thyroid nodules and differentiated thyroid cancer. Thyroid 2016;26(1):1–133. DOI: 10.1089/thy.2015.0020. © The Author(s). 2023 Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and non-commercial reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. 1,2 Department of Endocrine Surgery, Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India Corresponding Author: Sabaretnam Mayilvaganan, Department of Endocrine Surgery, Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India, Phone: +91 9655851510, e-mail: drretnam@gmail.com How to cite this article: Jagannath S, Mayilvaganan S. Comparison of Lobectomy vs Total Thyroidectomy for Intermediate-risk Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma with Lymph Node Metastasis. Indian J Endoc Surg Res 2023;18(1):38. Source of support: Nil Conflict of interest: None