Thyroid cancer

de A. Carpi, Jeffrey I. Mechanick

"Thyroid cancer evaluation and treatment has enjoyed very little evolution in comparison with other disease management strategies. The standard treatment algorithms for thyroid cancer have varied only in response to major, though infrequent, biotechnological innovations. These resultant algorithm node insertions produced paradigm changes, but there has been little to advance the care of the patient with advanced thyroid cancer--until very recently. Perhaps the reasons for a relative lack of interest and scientific progress are the overwhelming likelihood of benignity among thyroid nodules, the overwhelmingly favorable clinical outcome even if a patient has thyroid cancer, and the overwhelming long time required for clinical follow-up of these cancer patients. Unfortunately, the problem now is that we may be overmanaging low-risk patients, and we have not achieved the clinical responses we would have liked with high-risk patients"--Provided by publisher.