Vol. 38, No. 18

1-31-2007
By:

Thyroid cancer rates increase among women

Even though thyroid cancer rates among women have doubled in recent years, the news isn’t all bad.

That’s because the mortality rate for women with thyroid cancer has not increased, says Richard Kloos, a nationally recognized thyroid-cancer specialist at the Ohio State University Medical Center’s James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute.

Almost 327,000 people have thyroid cancer in the United States, including more than 250,000 women. Women will also account for three-quarters of the more than 30,000 new cases of thyroid cancer expected to occur this year, according to the National Cancer Institute.

“The rising incidence of thyroid cancer among women has caused some alarm, but research has suggested that many of these cases were small tumors that were found early and were highly curable,” says Kloos, who is a member of the Experimental Therapeutics program in Ohio State’s Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The incidence of thyroid cancer in women has increased from 4.6 percent annually from 1993 through 2000 to 9.1 percent annually from 2000 through 2003, says Kloos, who is a staff physician at The James and secretary of the American Thyroid Association. The organization provides national leadership in clinical care, research, education and public policy related to thyroid diseases.

“The incidence rates of thyroid cancer among women is probably increasing because improved imaging technologies, such as MRIs and ultrasound, are allowing earlier detection,” says Kloos, who is a member of a national task force that drafted new guidelines for treating thyroid cancer patients.

Early detection typically means better outcomes, although some of these tumors may never have caused problems, he says. Recent data shows that about half of the thyroid cancers being diagnosed today are smaller than 1 centimeter in size, and almost 90 percent of new diagnoses are less than 2 centimeters, says Kloos.

“The bulk of these tumors likely would not have been discovered and diagnosed years ago because the improved imaging technology did not exist then,” Kloos says. “The most common and least aggressive form — papillary thyroid cancer — now is often diagnosed early when it is the most curable.”

Thyroid cancer is three times more common in women than in men, particularly during child-bearing years. The key sign of thyroid cancer is a lump or nodule in the thyroid that is detected during a routine physical examination by a doctor. Kloos recommends doing monthly neck self-exams to check for any unusual lumps or masses that could be thyroid cancer.

Kloos, along with cancer center colleagues Matthew Ringel and Manisha Shah, treats patients with advanced cases of thyroid cancer at Ohio State’s James Cancer Hospital.

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