Radioiodine for Low-Risk Thyroid Cancer — the Swinging Pendulum

Differentiated thyroid cancer, the most common endocrine cancer, has three histologic subtypes: papillary, follicular, and Hürthle-cell cancers, with papillary thyroid cancers accounting for at least 80% of the total. The vast majority of patients with differentiated thyroid cancer have clinical stage I or stage II disease, with rates of death from this disease that approach zero.1 Since disease recurrence is a far more common problem than death, a staging system developed by the American Thyroid Association estimates recurrence risk on the basis of a number of pathological features, including tumor multifocality, size, and capsular invasion or angioinvasion; the degree of . . .