Nomogram Predicts Overall Survival in Patients With Stage IV Thyroid Cancer (TC): A Population-Based Analysis From the SEER Database.

Background: Stage IV Thyroid cancer (TC) has a relatively poor prognosis and lacks a precise and efficient instrument to forecast prognosis. Our study aimed to construct a nomogram for predicting the prognosis of patients with stage IV TC based on data from the SEER programme. Methods: We enrolled patients diagnosed with TC from 2004 to 2015 in the study. Furthermore, the median survival time (MST) for the patients equalled 25 months. The patients were split into two groups: the training group and validation group. We used descriptive statistics to calculate demographic and clinical variables, Student's t test was used to describe continuous variables, and the chi-square test was used to describe classified variables. We used the concordance index (C-index) to evaluate discrimination ability and calibration plots to evaluate calibration ability. The improvement of the nomogram compared with the AJCC TNM system was evaluated by the net weight classification index (NRI), comprehensive discriminant rate improvement (IDI) and decision curve analysis (DCA). Results: There were 3501 patients contained within our cohort, and the median follow-up was 25 months [quartile range (IQR): 6-60] in the whole population, 25 months (IQR: 6-60) in the training cohort, and 25 months (IQR: 5-59) in the validation cohort. The C-index value of the training cohort equalled 0.86 ( Conclusions: Our nomogram can be used to forecast the survival of patients with stage IV TC.