Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Thyroid surgery is nowadays associated with low morbidity and extremely low mortality. A consistent association has been observed between high surgical volume and better outcomes. Patients who undergo surgery by a skilled surgeon have fewer complications. On the other hand, different surgical techniques have been associated with different outcomes. Since 1997, thyroid diseases are treated in our department by a multidisciplinary team.

Objective: To access the results of thyroid surgery in our hospital, over the last 10 years.

Methods: We studied retrospectively the patient’s medical files that underwent thyroid surgery from 1999 to 2010. Statistic tests were used to analyze the different variables.

Results: A total of 240 patients underwent thyroid surgery over the 10-year study period. The mean age of the patients was 54 years and 76% were females. Pre-operative diagnosis was thyroid nodular disease in 83.3% (13.9% toxic multinodular goiter and 12.5% substernal goiter), papillary carcinoma in 6.7% and follicular neoplasm in 5.8%. 4.2% of the patients had relapsed Graves disease.

We performed lobectomy in 42.2% of cases and total thyroidectomy in 57.6%. Eight percent of patients had permanent complications (total thyroidectomy 6.4% and lobectomy 1.6%). Permanent laryngeal recurrent nerve lesions occurred in 3.4% of patients. Permanent hypoparathyroidism occurred in 4.2% of cases, always associated with total thyroidectomy.

Conclusions: Benign thyroid disease is the main surgical diagnostic indication in our hospital. Lobectomy is associated with better outcomes. Our complications rates are slightly higher than international reference centres.