National Epidemiologic Survey of Thyroid cancer (NEST) in Korea

The Korea Central Cancer Registry conducted the National Epidemiologic Survey of Thyroid cancer (NEST) to investigate changes in the epidemiological and clinical characteristics of thyroid cancer patients between 1999 and 2008. The NEST was designed to collect representative samples of patients with thyroid cancer diagnosed in the years 1999, 2005, and 2008 using a proportionally stratified and systematic random sampling method. Among 42,891 participants diagnosed with thyroid cancer, 5,796 participants were included in the final study population. This survey collected information on diagnostic methods and date, route of diagnosis, prior medical history and history of thyroid-related disease, tumor, lymph node, metastasis and collaborative stage, and treatment. The NEST dataset was also linked to the cause-of-death database from Statistics Korea. The mean age of the study participants was 46.9 years. The ratio of men to women was 1:5.5. In the analysis of the histologic type of cancer, the proportion of papillary thyroid carcinoma showed an increasing trend (p<0.01). In contrast, the proportion of distant metastasis and the mean tumor size of thyroid cancers showed decreasing trends over time (p<0.01, respectively).