Treatment
Extensive surgery can be effective when the condition is detected early, but a risk for recurrence remains. About half of patients have metastasis to regional lymph nodes at the time of diagnosis.
Unlike other differentiated thyroid carcinoma, there is no role for radioiodine treatment in medullary-type disease.
External beam radiotherapy should be considered for patients at high risk of regional recurrence, even after optimum surgical treatment. A retrospective study in 1996 found that external beam radiation was beneficial in some patients.
Read more about this topic: Medullary Thyroid Cancer
Famous quotes containing the word treatment:
“Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“I am glad you agree with me as to the treatment of the mining riots. We shall crush out the lawbreakers if the courts and juries do not fail.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts.... The question “Why did you start using narcotics in the first place?” should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)