As mentioned above, several previous studies have shown associations between TERT-p mutations and adverse clinicopathologic parameters or poor prognosis in various types of human cancers, including thyroid papillary carcinoma, melanoma, bladder cancer, and glioma (Chen et al. 2014a; Griewank et al. 2014; Lee et al. 2015; Nasirden et al. 2016; Simon et al. 2015; Wang et al. 2014), which was the main motivation for the present study. Here, TERT is linked to thyroid gland papillary carcinoma.