Successful Thyroid Cancer Treatment Varies From Hospital To Hospital

By Author: Dr. Victor Marchione
Total Articles: 90
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Thyroid cancer is a more common disease than you might
realize. More than 44,000 people are diagnosed with this
type of cancer annually in the United States. Usually, when
thyroid cancer is detected, it is treated by surgically
removing the thyroid. The good news is that most people
with thyroid cancer survive and fully recover.

Once the cancer has been brought under control, many
patients are often treated with radioactive iodine to kill off
any remnants of cancerous tissue. But here's some health
advice worth taking note of in regards to radioactive iodine
treatments. According to a recent study, there's a wide
variation from hospital to hospital in the percentage of
thyroid cancer patients getting radioactive iodine.

Researchers report this health news in the latest edition of

the "Journal of the American Medical Association." To
determine how radioactive iodine is being used throughout
hospitals in the U.S., researchers looked at information
from the U.S. National Cancer Database on nearly 190,000
thyroid cancer ...
... patients treated at 981 hospitals between
1990 and 2008.

During that period, the use of radioactive iodine increased
from about 40% of patients in 1990 to 56% of patients in
2008. The researchers found that patients who had "low-
risk" disease (stage 1) were less likely to receive
radioactive iodine than patients with advanced thyroid
cancer (stage 4). People with stage-2 and stage-3 cancers
were just as likely as those with stage-4 tumors to receive
the treatment.

Some other interesting facts revealed themselves when the
researchers further analyzed their data. For example, the
likelihood of receiving radioactive iodine also had a lot to
do with where people were treated. Overall, about 37 % of
women under age 45 with stage-1 tumors received
radioactive iodine. But that ranged from 0% at some
hospitals to more than 90% at others.

Unfortunately, there was an equally large margin for high-
risk cases. For a man over age 45 with stage-3 or stage-4
disease, the odds of getting radioactive iodine ranged from
25% at some hospitals to 90% at others. A discrepancy this
large at this stage of thyroid cancer progression is
worrisome, as radioactive iodine is considered the best way
to stave off the disease. In cases such as this, current
medical guidelines do recommend that doctors use the
radioactive treatments.

Thyroid cancer patients should get their doctor's advice
about timely and proactive treatment.

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