Results of a clinical correlation study indicate that patients with papillary thyroid cancer harbouring mutations in established oncogenes have inferior survival outcomes compared with patients harbouring wild-type forms of these genes. The genotypes of 1,051 patients with papillary thyroid cancer were investigated for the presence of mutations in the TERT promoter region and BRAFV600E mutations. A total of 292 patients had BRAFV600E mutations, 64 had TERT promoter mutations and 66 had both TERT promoter and BRAFV600E mutations; these groups of patients had 3.08, 6.62, and 29.86 cancer-specific deaths per 1,000 person years, respectively, compared with 0.8 in patients without either type of mutation. Further investigations of these risks of cancer-specific mortality confirmed this increased risk after adjustment for other clinicopathological variables.