Revised American Thyroid Association Guidelines for the Management of Medullary Thyroid Carcinoma

The American Thyroid Association appointed a Task Force of experts to revise the original Medullary Thyroid Carcinoma: Management Guidelines of the American Thyroid Association.Methods: The Task Force identified relevant articles using a systematic PubMed search, supplemented with additional published materials, and then created evidence-based recommendations, which were set in categories using criteria adapted from the United States Preventive Services Task Force Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.The original guidelines provided abundant source material and an excellent organizational structure that served as the basis for the current revised document.Results: The revised guidelines are focused primarily on the diagnosis and treatment of patients with sporadic medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) and hereditary MTC.Conclusions: The Task Force developed 67 evidence-based recommendations to assist clinicians in the care of patients with MTC.The Task Force considers the recommendations to represent current, rational, and optimal medical practice.OVERVIEW A ccording to current Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) data, medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) accounts for 1%-2% of thyroid cancers in the United States, a much lower range than frequently cited (3%-5%), primarily due to the marked increase in the relative incidence of papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) over the last three de-cades (1).Advances in the basic research and clinical investigation of MTC reported in specialty publications of endocrinology, genetics, nuclear medicine, oncology, pathology, pediatrics, radiology, and surgery make it challenging for clinicians to remain current on new developments.Several academic organizations have published guidelines for the management of patients with MTC (2-4).