Thyroid cancer treatment

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Thyroid diseases are common although cancer is rare. There are some controversial issues concerning the extent of surgical treatment of thyroid cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We have studied 614 cases of thyroidectomy inducing 82 of mostly papillary and follicular thyroid cancers. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: We observed that differentiated thyroid cancer has a predilection for the right lobe and one third of papillary tumors are multifocal. We have seen that fine needle aspiration cytology is the most useful preoperative study. Intraoperative frozen biopsy has a good specificity but sensitivity is low in our series, specially for follicular neoplasms. The treatment in our series consisted in total thyroidectomy and, in differentiated cancers, postoperative I-131. Survival is very good for differentiated cancers. Prognosis is poor for anaplastic carcinoma in the short term.