Anaplastic thyroid carcinoma, a report on 10 cases

Anaplastic thyroid carcinomas are undifferentiated and highly aggressive tumors of the thyroid follicular epithelium, with a disease-specific mortality approaching 100 percent. This study reports ten cases with advanced anaplastic thyroid carcinoma with ineffective surgical interventions. Between 2001-2006, we treated 10 patients with anaplastic carcinoma of the thyroid. All patients presented with advanced phase and were documented by pathological study. The surgical intervention was thyroidectomy in 3 cases, debunking surgery in other three, just tracheostomy in three cases, and only biopsy in one patient. All of our patients died in 4 days to 8 months after surgery. Surgical intervention had no benefit in treatment of advanced anaplastic carcinoma of the thyroid and the suitable surgical intervention was to maintain an open airway. Early recognition of the disease is essential to allow prompt initiation of therapy. There is no cure for advanced situations, and surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy play no important role in the treatment

Thyroid tuberculosis

The incidence of tuberculosis is high and extrapulmonary tuberculosis is seen more frequently, the thyroid tuberculosis is rare. Thyroid tuberculosis is presented as thyroid nodule, thyroiditis or abscess formation. This condition should therefore be recognized whenever goiter is being treated, because it has an entirely different treatment. The aim of this report is to present thyroid tuberculosis in order to gain a better understanding of its clinical characteristic, diagnosis and treatment we present 9 cases of thyroid tuberculosis since 1995-2006 from north of Iran. They comprised 5 patients with thyroiditis, 2 cases with abscess formation and 2 with thyroid nodules. All patients were diagnosed using Fine Needle Aspiration [FNA] and treated by repeated surgery and anti-tuberculosis drugs. It is concluded that tuberculosis of thyroid should be kept in mind while treating diseases of the thyroid such as thyroid nodule, thyroiditis, thyrotoxicosis especially in communities with high prevalence of tuberculosis. The diagnosis of thyroid tuberculosis is facilitated by FNA and its treatment is achieved by simple surgery as well as anti-tuberculosis therapy