A Study of Association between Preoperative Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology and Post-Operative Histopathological Examination of Solitary Thyroid Nodule among Patients Attending North Bengal Medical College and Hospital, Siliguri.

FNAC (Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology) is an essential tool in the preoperative diagnosis and preoperative planning for surgery of solitary thyroid nodules. It is a cost effective procedure that provides specific diagnosis rapidly with minimal complication. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the accuracy of Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology as a diagnostic tool in detecting malignancy in case of solitary thyroid nodule by correlating the preoperative fine needle aspiration cytology (USG Guided) findings with post-operative histopathology findings of the excised specimen in a sub Himalayan tertiary medical college & hospital.METHODSIt was a cross sectional hospital based study conducted on 30 patients in the period from April 2015 to March 2016 after acceptance from West Bengal University of Health Sciences and approval from ethical committee. All admitted patients having solitary thyroid nodule (confirmed clinically & ultrasonographically), biochemically euthyroid and giving consent for surgery were included in this study. Patients who are medically unfit for surgery, biochemically hypo- or hyper-thyroid and not giving consent for surgery were excluded from the study.RESULTSThe sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, positive predictive value and negative predictive value of FNAC for diagnosis of neoplastic solitary thyroid nodule were 75%, 94.44%, 86.67%, 90% and 85%. Commonest malignancy detected was papillary carcinoma in 9 patients.CONCLUSIONSIt is evident from our study that USG guided FNAC should be regarded as the investigation of choice and first line investigation in evaluation of cases with solitary thyroid nodule due to its simplicity, high diagnostic accuracy, easy to perform procedure and absence of significant complications.

Activated charcoal fi lter effectively reduces p-benzosemiquinone from the mainstream cigarette smoke and prevents emphysema.

In this paper, we have made a comparative evaluation of the cytotoxicity and pathophysiological effects of mainstream smoke from cellulose acetate (CA)-fi ltered cigarettes with that of charcoal-fi ltered cigarettes developed in our laboratory. Previously, we had demonstrated that the mainstream smoke from an Indian CA-fi ltered commercial cigarette contains p-benzosemiquinone (p-BSQ), a major, highly toxic, long-lived water-soluble radical. Here, we have examined 16 brands of different CA-fi ltered cigarettes including Kentucky research cigarettes, and observed that mainstream smoke from all the cigarettes contains substantial amounts of p-BSQ (100–200 μg/cigarette). We also show that when the CA fi lter is replaced by a charcoal fi lter, the amount of p-BSQ in the mainstream smoke is reduced by 73–80%, which is accompanied by a reduction of carbonyl formation in bovine serum albumin to the extent of 70– 90%. The charcoal fi lter also prevented cytotoxicity in A549 cells as evidenced by MTT assay, apoptosis as evidenced by FACS analysis, TUNEL assay, overexpression of Bax, activation of p53 and caspase 3, as well as emphysematous lung damage in a guinea pig model as seen by histology and morphometric analysis. The results indicate that the charcoal fi lter developed in our laboratory may protect smokers from cigarette smoke-induced cytotoxity, protein modifi cation, apoptosis and emphysema.