Thyroid Cancer and Radiation

Chong Soon Kim

doi:10.11106/cet.2015.8.1.1

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Kim: Thyroid Cancer and Radiation

Review Article

Clin Exp Thyroidol 2015;8(1):1-7.

Published online: 4 May 2015

DOI: https://doi.org/10.11106/cet.2015.8.1.1

Thyroid Cancer and Radiation

Chong Soon Kim

Division of Endocrinology, Department of Internal Medicine, Department of Nuclear Medicine, The Armed Forces Capital Hospital, Seongnam, Korea

Correspondence: Chong Soon, Kim, MD, PhD, Division of Endocrinology, Department of Internal Medicine, Department of Nuclear Medicine, The Armed Forces Capital Hospital, 81 Saemaeul-ro, 117 beong-gil, Bundang-gu, Seongnam 463-040, Korea Tel: 82-31-725-6500, Fax: 82-31-706-0355, E-mail: kjsoon33@naver.com

Received 30 April 2015 Accepted 6 June 2015

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Epidemiological studies have reported an increasing incidence of thyroid cancer worldwide. This phenomenon is unclear whether it is apparent increase or true increase. In Korea, the incidence rate of thyroid cancer in both men and women showed abrupt increase from 1999 through 2011. The possible reason of this increase is suggested as improved screening with sensitive diagnostic procedures. If the incidence increase is real, there are risk factors such as ionizing radiation, obesity, diabetes mellitus, genetic predisposition, hormones, iodine diet, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, and pollutants contributing to this increased incidence. Exposure to ionizing radiation is a well-known risk factor for thyroid cancer. This was verified by epidemiological studies from survivors after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Chernobyl accident. The studies demonstrated that the dose-response relationship seems to be linear. However, a statistically significant increase has hardly been described with exposure to low dose radiation (<100 mSv). In addition, with respect to the data on adult exposure, there was no proven radiation related increase of the thyroid cancer incidence. Therefore, a clear understanding for the pathogenesis of radiation induced thyroid cancer is essential. Like other cancers, there are several gene alterations thought to be involved in pathogenesis of sporadic thyroid cancer. Whereas, the exact pathogenesis of radiation induced thyroid cancer by genetic alteration has not been demonstrated until now. Recently, gene expression profiling by microarray analysis has been applied to investigate the possible pathogenesis.

Keywords: Radiation, Thyroid cancer, Epidemiology, Pathogenesis

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