Global increase in thyroid cancer incidence in children & adolescents may be driven by overdiagn
Dr Salvatore Vaccarella, lead author of a new study by scientists from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in collaboration with several international partners, presents the main findings of the study.
The researchers investigated incidence rates of thyroid cancer in children and adolescents aged 0–19 years. This condition was very rare globally until about 2000, but the incidence increased rapidly in recent years in many countries. This finding suggests that overdiagnosis is likely to be the main driver of these increases. Overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of tumours that do not progress to cause symptoms or death in an individual’s lifetime.
The study, published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, used the most up-to-date, high-quality data from 49 countries and territories worldwide, including several diverse and densely populated low- and middle-income countries.
Overdiagnosis of thyroid cancer is the consequence of increased surveillance of the thyroid gland and the introduction of new diagnostic procedures, such as neck ultrasonography. This may lead to the detection of many indolent, non-lethal tumours, which are known to exist in the thyroid gland of otherwise healthy individuals of any age, including children and adolescents. The problem of overdiagnosis is more pronounced in settings where health care services are not well regulated.
Children with thyroid cancer usually undergo a total thyroidectomy, which requires lifelong thyroid hormone replacement therapy and markedly affects the quality of life of these young individuals, who are predominantly girls.
The authors suggest that the existing recommendation against screening for thyroid cancer in the asymptomatic adult population who are free from specific risk factors should be extended to explicitly recommend against screening for thyroid cancer in similar populations of children and adolescents.
Read the article https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-8587(20)30401-0
Read IARC Press Release 293 on the study https://iarc.fr/wp-content/upl....oads/2021/01/pr293_E
More about IARC www.iarc.fr