Endocrine Abstracts

Thyroid neoplasias show a wide range of biological behaviours from indolent to highly aggressive, invasive and metastatic cancers. The great majority of thyroid carcinomas are successfully treated with surgery, radioactive iodine and TSH suppressive therapy. However, a subset of tumors can behave aggressively, with distant metastasis and/or local invasion. These patients have a poor prognosis and a shorter survival, remaining a challenging task in treatment options. Cytotoxic chemotherapy has only limited effect, without clear evidence that benefit outweighs risk of toxicity. Radiotherapy is an option for surgically unresectable neck recurrences and for bone and brain metastases. Recently, interest rose on tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKI) and, currently, there are several TKIs that have been approved for advanced thyroid cancers either from follicular or parafollicular origin. A judicious use of different treatment modalities in advanced thyroid carcinoma may improve patients’ outcome and prolong survival. Illustrative cases of some advanced thyroid cancer patients will be presented and discussed in this MTE session.