A cohort of 1039 consecutive cases of thyroid carcinoma treated at a single institution and followed for an average of 11.9 years or until death included 102 encapsulated well-differentiated follicular-patterned tumors that had been diagnosed as carcinoma because of complete capsular invasion and/or papillary carcinoma-type nuclei. None of these cases were among the 67 patients from the cohort who died as a result of their thyroid carcinoma. The results of this study and a critical review of the pertinent literature indicate that tumors with these features are associated with an extremely favorable outcome and that they do not play a significant role in the fatality rate of thyroid carcinoma.

The term “ovarian carcinoma” encompasses at least five different malignant neoplasms: high-grade serous carcinoma, low-grade serous carcinoma, endometrioid carcinoma, mucinous carcinoma, and clear cell carcinoma. These five histotypes demonstrated distinctive histological, molecular, and clinical features. The rise of novel target therapies and of a tailored oncological approach has demanded an integrated multidisciplinary approach in the setting of ovarian carcinoma. The need to implement a molecular-based classification in the worldwide diagnostic and therapeutic setting of ovarian cancer demanded a search for easy-to-use and cost-effective molecular-surrogate biomarkers, relying particularly on immunohistochemical analysis. The present review focuses on the role of immunohistochemistry as a surrogate of molecular analysis in the everyday diagnostic approach to ovarian carcinomas.