ABSTRACT
Introduction: Thyroid cancer is the most common malignancy of endocrine systems. Nowadays, Fine Needle Aspiration Biopsy [FNAB] is the gold standard in the diagnosis of thyroid cancers. Despite the high accuracy of this method, roughly 20-30 % of patients have indeterminate cytological results and surgery [histo pathological examination] is required for final confirmation of malignancy, a limitation, for which the need to provide a non-invasive approach seems necessary. Metabolomics is the study of a complete set of metabolites in biologic samples and compared to normal cells, metabolites in cancer cells show alterations. This article reviews the role of metabolomics i.e studies in the discrimination and diagnosis of thyroid cancers
Materials and Methods: A literature search was performed in main databases including PubMed, Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus and Science direct in a 7-year time frame from 2010 to 2017. All the articles obtained were in English
Results: Nuclear magnetic resonance [NMR] - and mass spectrometry [MS] - based techniques are the main methods in metabolomic studies, and based on the results of these studies, changes in carbohydrates, lipids and nucleotides' metabolic pathways and the resulting metabolite alterations observed in thyroid tumors were compared with normal tissues
Conclusion: It seems that in the near future, metabolomic studies, besides conventional methods will be used for diagnosis and differentiation of different types of thyroid cancers and will most likely introduce altered metabolic pathways as therapeutic targets
ABSTRACT
Ethical issues are common to all sciences, and biological and medical sciences are no exception. Since these sciences deal directly with the physical and mental health of humans, they are exposed to thorough assessment to maintain the individuals, prestige and dignity. Development and application of cellular and molecular biology in medical sciences cause challenges and responsibilities in ethics, not easily predictable. This is because of three general properties of genetic information: 1] It has private and familial concepts; 2] It often is related to the disease in the feature, hence it has predictive properties that can provide information about the next generation, and can also provide data on previous generations and 3] Genetic tests often diagnose some diseases, for which there is no efficient treatment or prevention. Hence the predictive and risk-assessing nature of genetic information has made human genetic material invaluable to different organizations and unfortunately open to misuse by health care planners, insurers and employers. Furthermore social discrimination and psychological injuries also threaten individuals undergoing genetics testing. This review article discusses the ethical issues raised in the area of genetic research, such as informed consent, confidentiality, assessment of damage and utility, ownership of genetic findings and recall of family members