Facts and treatments regarding thyroid cancer

เขียนโดย oneself ป้ายกำกับ: medullary cancer, neck dissection, Thyroid Cancer, thyroidectomy, thyroidgland

by Groshan Fabiola

Thyroid cancer is not a common disease, can occur to anyone and even though it requires an adequate treatment, unlike other types of cancer thr thyroid one can be cured most of the times. Although, thyroid cancers are more common in females, males tend to have a greater risk than females for cancer occurring.

Moreover, thyroid cancer includes many types of cancers, the most common types are papillary, follicular or mixed papillary and follicular forms and on the other hand, the less common types that affect the thyroid are medullary cancer, anaplastic cancer and lymphoma. In addition to this, unlike other types of thyroid cancer, medullary thyroid cancer is a severe form which in many cases may involve other parts of the body, such as endocrine glands, pituitary, adrenal, pancreas and parathyroid glands, an involvement which is known as Multiple endocrine neoplastia syndrome. It is important to note that even though this thype of cancer is quite unusual to be transmitetted, patients with medullary cancer should ensure that family memebers will make some tests in order to be sure that they aren not in danger.

Furthermore, specialists have discovered that thyroid cancer can occur due to certain factors. For example, x-ray treatments that used to be very popular a few years ago and were used to treat certain affections such as acne, blood vessel tumors of the face, enlarged thymus, sore throat. chronic coughs and even excess facial hair are no longer performed due to their negative effect for the thyroid gland which tends to be very sensitive at radiations. Moreover, an important contributing factor for the occurence of thyroid cancer is the prolonged exposure to head and neck irradiation in childhood and even adulthood.

Treatments for thyroid cancers are various and depend on the stage and type of thyroid cancer of the patient. For instance a first step is the confirmation of a thyroid nodule is present and involves the usage of scanning and ultrasound procedures. Moreover a better procedure for diagnose the patient which is suspected of thyroid cancer is a fine needle aspiration biopsy. Even though many surgeons consider that it is enough to remove just the affected part of the thyroidgland, it has been considered that a whole removal of the gland may help more and also will prevent a possible recurrence of the cancer. Although a Thyroidectomy is an efficient preocedure, the risks that involves can be very severe (deficiency in calcium by the inadvertent removal of nearby parathyroid glands and in some cases the damaging of the vocal cord). Much more when the cancer tends to spread from the thyroid glands to lymph nodes nearby the neck, a surgery called neck dissection is necessary in order to remove the tumor.