The p16 isoform of CDKN2A inhibits ferroptosis to promote the progression of papillary thyroid carcinoma by regulating the p53/SLC7A11/GPX4 pathway

The PTC gene set expression profile was downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) at (https://portal.gdc.cancer.gov/). The DESeq2 package in R was employed to identify differentially expressed genes between PTC and normal tissue samples, with a significance threshold of |Log2FC| > 2 and P < 0.05. We further utilised GEPIA2 (http://gepia2.cancer-pku.cn/) and UALCAN (http://ualcan.path.uab.edu) to validate the differential expression of CDKN2A in PTC. We utilised the “survival” package in R for survival analysis, employing the “survfit” function for Kaplan–Meier estimation and the “coxph” function for both univariate and multivariate Cox regression. The predictive power for 1-, 3-, and 5-year overall survival (OS) was further evaluated using time-dependent receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves from the “timeROC” package. This analysis assessed models based on CDKN2A expression levels, whereas the performance of clinical parameters (age, sex, and tumour stage) was also evaluated.