Reassessing surgical guidelines for papillary thyroid cancer impact on survival: Expanding indications for lobectomy.

This is the first study to compare lobectomy and total thyroidectomy outcomes while adjusting for and quantifying the potential effects of unmeasured confounding variables on observational data. The findings suggest that total thyroidectomy is unlikely to offer a survival advantage over lobectomy regardless of tumor size, patient age, or overall risk of death.