To date, 77 (10 %) and 37 (5 %) patients have developed lymph node and distant recurrence, respectively, and 10 (1 %) have died of PTC. The BRAF mutation was positive in 281 patients (37 %), and it had no prognostic impact on lymph node recurrence-free (LNRFS) (
p = 0.700), distant recurrence-free (DRFS) (
p = 0.696), and cause-specific (CSS) (
p = 0.125) survival in our entire series. However, CSS of BRAF mutation-positive high-risk patients based on AMES (
p = 0.030), MACIS (score >6) (
p = 0.017), the UICC stage (IVa) (
p = 0.021), CIH classification (Sugitani et al. Surgery 135:139–148,
2004) (
p = 0.015), and our own classification system (Ito et al. World J Surg 34:2570–2580,
2010) (
p = 0.010) were significantly poorer than CSS of mutation-negative high-risk patients. The BFAF mutation did not affect CSS of non-high-risk patients, although the incidence of the BRAF mutation did not significantly differ between high-risk and non-high-risk groups based on these classification systems. The BRAF mutation was not related to LNRFS and DRFS in the subsets of high-risk and non-high-risk patients.