Genetic predictors of outcome are reviewed in the context of a disease--cancer--that can be (too) simplistically described as a 'successful, invasive clone of our own tissues'. Context has many faces that determine a thyroid cancer patient's outcome beyond the influence of genetic markers. There is also plenty of evidence on the prognostic meaning of the interplay between genetics and context/m...

BACKGROUND Sensitivity and specificity data regarding positron emission tomography (PET) and PET/CT for surveillance of well-differentiated thyroid cancer does not evaluate subtypes separately. Papillary and follicular thyroid carcinoma may have different characteristics on PET/CT imaging and so should be investigated individually. METHODS This is a systematic meta-analysis of studies using P...

We evaluated caveolin-1 expression in the human thyroid neoplasia spectrum with the aim of examining differences in expression as detected by two anti-caveolin-1 antibodies, and secondly, to investigate the association of caveolin-1 expression levels with aggressive papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC). Immunohistochemical staining using sc894 or AV09019 antibodies revealed that caveolin-1 was gen...

Thyroid nodules are a very common clinical finding, and although the majority of them are benign, thyroid carcinoma accounts for about 5-15% of nodules. Fine-needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) is actually used for the differential diagnosis of these lesions. Although in most cases this examination clearly distinguishes benign from malignant lesions, some fine-needle aspiration (FNA) samples fall...

Myasthenia gravis (MG) is an autoantibody-mediated disorder affecting the neuromuscular junction causing characteristic fatigable muscle weakness. Though it can be associated with tumours of the thymus as well as thyroid disorders, it is rare for both to coexist. The exact prevalence of thyroid carcinoma in MG with thymoma is not known but only about a dozen cases have been reported in the lite...

HBME-l is an antimesothelial monoclonal antibody that recognizes an unknown antigen on microvilli of mesothelial cells. The antibody is only relatively specific for mesothelium and is used in the differential diagnosis of mesothelioma and adenocarcinoma within the context of an appropriate immuno-histochemical panel. HBME-l has also been reported to strongly and uniformly stain papillary and fo...

Undifferentiated carcinoma (also known as anaplastic carcinoma) of the thyroid gland is a highly aggressive malignant neoplasm composed of undifferentiated cells that exhibit immunohistochemical or ultrastructural epithelial differentiation. Nearly all patients report a long history of thyroid gland disease, often goiter or Hashimoto thyroiditis. In most cases, there is a transformation from a ...

INTRODUCTION Common modes of presentation of follicular thyroid carcinoma include a solitary thyroid nodule and cervical lymphadenopathy. We report four patients who presented with axial skeletal metastases rather than the usual neck lumps. METHODS A review of a database of 389 cases of thyroid cancer, managed by our department from 1990 to 2003, was perfomed. Based on each patient's presenti...

CONTEXT Well-differentiated thyroid carcinomas include papillary (PTC) and follicular (FTC) carcinomas. FTC is usually a more aggressive form of cancer than the more common papillary type. miR-191 expression is frequently altered in several neoplasias, being up-regulated in some cases, such as pancreatic carcinomas, and down-regulated in other carcinomas, such as melanomas. OBJECTIVE The obje...