VIDEO: Addressing asymptomatic patients ‘complicated’ in thyroid cancer

Editor’s note: This is an automatically generated transcript. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

So that's complex. So some thyroid cancers may be asymptomatic and cause no harm for a patient's entire life. And so we know that there are patients that live their full life, they die of something else, and they had tiny thyroid cancers that just sat there and never caused a problem. There are other thyroid cancers that will grow. They'll move to lymph nodes and potentially could be life-threatening. You know, that's a minority, but it does occur. And so the asymptomatic patient is complex because we don't necessarily recommend screening for everyone because you'll tap into this reservoir of sort of indolent disease that wouldn't cause harm. And yet there are some patients, you know, where their thyroid cancer can be more aggressive. And so we pay attention to symptoms. So we pay attention to someone who has a rapidly growing mass, that's very concerning. Someone who palpates lymph nodes, that’s concerning. New change in voice is concerning. We pay attention to things such as family history, but as I mentioned, most of the time it’s not familial and so there’s not a lot of known risk factors. But the asymptomatic patient is common and how to address that's complicated.