[Hyperthyroidism in thyroid cancer. Retrospective study of 53 cases]

Hyperthyroidism was diagnosed in 53 of 273 thyroid carcinoma patients at the time of their first examination (between 1971 and 1983). This corresponds to 19.5% of these mainly well-differentiated thyroid cancers. In 24 (45%) patients the hyperthyroidism and the thyroid carcinoma were two separate distinct illnesses: of 4 patients with Graves' disease (1.5% of 273), 2 had been operated because of an additional solitary cold nodule, and in the other 2 an occult carcinoma was found intraoperatively. Twenty patients of this group had Plummer's disease: there was a malignant cold nodule within a multinodular goiter with multifocal functional autonomy (MFA)(n = 14) or a carcinoma located near the solitary hot nodule of the toxic adenoma (TA)(n = 6). In these patients the distribution of the different histologies was about the same as in other thyroid cancer patients from this region. The remaining 29 patients (55%) had Plummer's disease, 28 with the classical finding of a solitary toxic adenoma, in which the hot nodule and the malignant tumor were identical. It was possible to confirm this identity histologically in 10 out of 24 cases, retrospectively. Eight of these patients had metastases with radioiodine uptake at the time of the first examination. Of the tumors in this group, 24 were follicular and 5 papillary carcinomas. As a rough estimate, one malignant, scintigraphically hot tumor is found for every 50 benign toxic adenomas. Criteria for the differentiation are: recent growth of the nodule, tumor size of greater than 5 cm diameter or greater than 35 g and an elevated T3-level of less than 0.06 nmol/l/g tumor.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)