Clinicopathological study and Management of Thyroid Malignancies

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Thyroid cancer is overwhelmingly the most common type of endocrine malignancy accounting for majority of death due to endocrine cause. It is a heterogenous group of tumours that show considerate variability in histological appearance, in biological behaviour. Clinically it presents as any other benign condition of thyroid in its early stages. So success in treatment of this condition lies largely upon early diagnosis and appropriate management. Hence this study is done to evaluate the modes of presentation, incidence of various pathological types, accuracy of FNAC in the diagnosis and surgical management. METHODOLOGY: Patient presenting with sign and symptoms of carcinoma thyroid, who were clinically evaluated and confirmed by FNAC were chosen for the study. Patients less than 12 years of age and those who were previously treated for any other thyroid ailments were excluded from the study. RESULTS: The occurrence of carcinoma thyroid is maximum in 4th decade, female patients outnumbering males. FNAC was found to be simple, cost effective and reliable investigation with overall diagnostic accuracy of 98%. Most of the well differentiated carcinomas were categorised into low risk group of AMES classification. INTERPRETATION AND CONCLUSION: FNAC is a practical and accurate investigation that provides tissue diagnosis. The overall approach in management of thyroid malignancy is multi modal comprehensive therapy which is mainly dominated by surgical treatment. The extent of surgery depends on clinical staging, cytology and risk categorisation