It’s a rare cancer that’s typically found accidentally. Health experts say women are the usual target for thyroid cancer, but it can happen to anyone at any age. Studies show about 200,000 people are diagnosed with thyroid cancer every year.

Dr. Jacob Goldberger, a surgeon on medical staff of Lee Memorial Health System, says thyroid cancer can start off as a scratchy voice or a lump in the neck. “Commonly, people will come in and complain of hoarseness, or complain of food getting stuck because it hasn’t taken a turn around the nodule, or they’ll complain of voice change.”

If a health expert locates a lump in the thyroid during an examination, they may decide to do a biopsy to determine if it’s thyroid cancer. “These are outpatient procedures that we use a small needle to take tissue samples of,” said Dr. Goldberger.

If the lump is cancerous, health experts will typically recommend surgery to remove it. “Fortunately for us, thyroid cancer is not an aggressive cancer. It’s a cancer that is managed surgically and with excellent success and survival,” said Dr. Goldberger.

He says the survival rate after surgery is about 80 percent. Depending on the size of the mass, surgeons will either remove part of the thyroid or the entire thyroid. “If I remove the whole thyroid or a majority of the thyroid, you no longer have enough thyroid hormone to function normally. So these patients become sluggish, they gain weight, they lack the energy to function normally,” said Dr. Goldberger. Those patients will have to take daily medication to replace the hormone.

“We don’t know what causes it. There is a form that is a little more aggressive than the other non-aggressive forms that relates to family genetics. It’s called medullary cancer. And that’s the only one that’s really been shown to be familial,” said Dr. Goldberger.

While the causes aren’t clear, he says the treatment is. If the cancer is caught early patients who have surgery rarely have any reoccurring problems.


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Lee Memorial Health System in Fort Myers, FL is the largest network of medical care facilities in Southwest Florida and is highly respected for its expertise, innovation and quality of care. For nearly a century, we’ve been providing our community with everything from primary care treatment to highly specialized care services and robotic assisted surgeries.

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