Prospective Observational Study of the Role of Unilateral Prophylactic Central Compartmental Lymph Node Dissection in Early Papillary Thyroid Cancer

In this single-centre cohort, unilateral PCND identified occult level VI disease in a substantial proportion of selected early cN0 PTC, with low permanent morbidity, but laterality interpretation and oncologic inference are limited by specimen labelling constraints and short follow-up, so the findings are hypothesis-generating and require validation in larger comparative studies.