How often are thyroid cancers found because of assessment for something else? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Thyroid cancers are most often found because someone is being evaluated for another issue and imaging finds a cancer, a very large international study concludes. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, says it’s unclear what these findings mean.

Nelson: The thyroid surgery was done at 16 centers across four countries. Only about a third of them were performed in patients who had some kind of symptomatic thyroid problem. The rest of them were all asymptomatic.  6% were the result of some kind of diagnostic cascade, 20% were found by an incidental finding on some X-ray study of one kind or another done for a different purpose, about 13% were on screening that was recommended by the physician. The biggest bucket was on an accidental finding by a scan.   :31

Nelson says screening specifically for thyroid cancer probably isn’t the best course at this point, and more research is needed. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.