After the update of the American Thyroid Association ATA guidelines on diagnosis and treatment of patients with thyroid cancer in [1], it became evident that, for patients with low-risk thyroid cancer, these recommendations presented views on the requirement for adjuvant radioiodine therapy different from the recommendations of the European Thyroid Association ETA [2] and daily practice in Switzerland.
In order to avoid offering differing treatment options to patients and thus potential uncertainties, it is important that physicians who take care of such patients have similar views on the matter. With the intention to find a common view on the management of patients with low-risk papillary thyroid cancer PTC , a multidisciplinary working group was initiated by the Swiss Society for Endocrinology and Diabetes and endorsed by the Swiss Society for Nuclear Medicine and the working group of Swiss Endocrine Surgeons.
The working group thus included the endocrinologists, nuclear medicine physicians, pathologists and endocrine surgeons who are authors of this report. The discussions started with a meeting at the Triemlispital in Zurich on 11 May and were followed by various written exchanges of opinion during the preparation of a manuscript.
The report presented herein is a summary of the meeting and the post-meeting discussions. The care of patients with thyroid cancer is a wide area that covers presurgical management of thyroid nodules, the choice of the appropriate surgery and postsurgical care including radioiodine treatment.
Our discussions focused primarily on the identification of patients with low-risk PTC and their initial treatment options. Obtaining high-level evidence on patients with low-risk PTC is difficult because the disease progresses very slowly and controlled long-term studies lasting many years in thousands of patients are needed in order to acquire the necessary data.
