[Follow up of thyroglobulin levels in patients with surgically treated, highly differentiated thyroid cancer]

The highly differentiated thyroid tumours account for 0.80 percent of all human malignancies. The papillary and follicular tumour tissues of this tumour type are relatively benign, hormone dependent and beside their treatment specificity they secrete the tumour specific thyreoglobulin. Thus it becomes possible to follow the development of metastases, the effectiveness of therapy applied as well as the history of the disease. The authors studied the change of thyreoglobulin level in 153 patients with highly differentiated thyroid cancer. In 29 of 32 metastatic patients pathologically elevated (70 to 100 ng/ml) thyreoglobulin level was observed. This proves the 91 percent specificity of the method in verified metastatic tumours. Compared to the total body scintigraphy 3 false negative cases were found. The authors establish that, irrespective of the site of metastasis, the thyreoglobulin level is higher in the follicular than in the papillary subtype. It is concluded that the measurement of the serum thyreoglobulin level is a suitable marker of the highly differentiated thyroid cancer since it represents the local recurrence of distant metastases with a significant increase while the therapy-resultant tumour diminution with a marked decrease, respectively.