Reflections

If you read about thyroid cancer, everyone agrees that its incidence is on the rise. In recent months, there has been lots of press coverage as how this increased thyroid incidence is due to overdiagnosis. To illustrate the overdiagnosis with an example, we need to take a look at South Korea. There was a huge increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer in South Korea which was blamed on overdiagnosis . But a recent review article on this topic cautions; not so fast . Thyroid cancers form about 2.1% of total cancer diagnoses worldwide, with women disproportionately affected, accounting for about 77% of the cases. The phenomenon of more women patients than men is unique to thyroid pathology and is also seen in Hashimoto's thyroiditis and Graves' disease. Majority of thyroid cancers are termed differentiated with two main subtypes, papillary thyroid cancers (PTC) and follicular thyroid cancers (FTC). The increased incidence of the thyroid cancer is mainly attributed to increas...

Follicular Thyroid cancer and new driver mutations New developments on thyroid cancer front this week. A research group from South Korea  published an article on the transcriptional and mutational landscape of follicular (FTC) and papillary thyroid cancers (PTC). The reason this is big news is that this is the first time when a comprehensive data is being published on FTCs. Comprehensive data on PTC already exist as it was published in 2014 . I am not going to discuss the whole of the article but there was few interesting points which caught the eye. One of which was that the authors proposed new driver mutations for thyroid cancer, of the many two of them are EZH1 (a member of polycomb group protein complex) and LKB1. The interesting part came from another group in Italy who published a paper in JCI  about role of EZH1 in development of thyroid adenomas. The paper describes the role of cAMP signaling from TSHR mutations which when combined with EHZ1 mutations lead t...