What to do about metastatic thyroid cancer

Thyroid cancer includes four types and the treatment methods are as follows: 1. Treatment of the most common metastatic papillary thyroid cancer: First of all, the primary lesion should be removed. Because thyroid cancer does not require radiotherapy or chemotherapy, so for distant metastases or lung metastases, the thyroid gland must be locally excised, especially the metastases and lymph nodes in the neck must be completely removed, and postoperative isotope therapy must be done to achieve long-term survival and better therapeutic effect. 2. For this type of patients, the thyroid gland must be partially removed before isotope treatment for metastasis; 3. In general, medullary carcinoma requires almost all of the thyroid gland to be removed during surgery because it is not effective for isotope treatment. In case the lesion metastasizes and recurs, targeted therapy may be done, which is the most popular approach nowadays because chemotherapy is also ineffective; 4. The survival period of undifferentiated carcinoma is particularly short, which is about half a year, so there is almost no much treatment time to consider after surgery. Surgery to clarify the diagnosis and release the compression may provide relief for a period of time. Post-operative radiotherapy is to supplement the therapeutic effect of surgery and cannot play a radical role, so generally it is not too recommended to do treatment.