Followup for patients with papillary thyroid cancer

Since the end of the 70-ies, as the radioactive iodine therapy was initiated, the prognosis of the well-differentiated thyroid carcinomas improved like no other. Despite the success of the therapy, about 30% of the papillary thyroid carconimas show a recurrence. Therefore the question about the followup of these carcinomas is quite interesting.

This is the topic of a trial, read in a recent publication in Journal of the American College of Surgeons. The routine cervical ultrasonography and the unstimulated thyroglobulin was suggested to be a good current strategy for the followup.

I liked the following sentence: "Surgery remains the optimal treatment of cervical recurrence, which is the dominant pattern of treatment failure."