Endocrine Abstracts

The natural history of thyroid eye disease (TED), the most frequent extrathyroidal manifestation of Graves' disease, is not completely understood, nor it is clear whether treatments for concomitant hyperthyroidism can influence it. Neither thionamides nor thyroidectomy appear to be disease-modifying treatments. What about radioiodine (RI) therapy? Results are conflicting, owing to selection bias, nonstandardized ocular evaluation, and the retrospective and uncontrolled feature...

Radioiodide therapy of thyroid cancer represents the most effective form of systemic radiotherapy available to the clinician today. The ability of thyroid cancer cells to concentrate iodide is induced by expression in the follicular cell membrane of the sodium iodide symporter, NIS. Some thyroid cancers lack expression of this protein and therefore the ability to concentrate iodide, making them insensitive to 131-I therapy. Several investigators have characterized the expressi...

The Chernobyl accident in 1986 resulted in a release of radioiodine that contaminated large areas of what are now Belarus, Northern Ukraine and a neighbouring area of Russia. The major health consequence of the accident to date has been a large increase in thyroid cancer in those who were children or adolescents at the time of exposure. The increase is mostly restricted to an increase in papillary carcinoma, of a particular subtype (the solid follicular variant) and associated...