Artificial thyroid cancer epidemic

Overly meticulous examinations are detecting the condition in the early stages and resulting in unnecessary surgeries. Research led by ANU has found doctors around the world are over diagnosing the most common thyroid cancer, creating an artificial epidemic that costs billions of dollars each year in unnecessary medical costs. Lead researcher Associate Professor Suhail Doi said diagnoses of differentiated thyroid cancer globally had increased three-fold during the past 25 years despite no change to the disease's low death rate. "Overly meticulous examinations are detecting the condition in the early stages and resulting in unnecessary surgeries," said Dr Doi, a clinical epidemiologist at the ANU Research School of Population Health and an endocrinologist. "Active monitoring rather than intervention is appropriate in many cases, similar to how doctors treat prostate cancer today." He said differentiated thyroid cancer mainly involves papillary and follicular tumours that don't usually progress to clinical forms of cancer. Around 2,500 new cases of differentiated thyroid cancer will be diagnosed in Australia this year. Thyroid cancer surgery has substantial consequences for patients.