CARCINOMA OF THE THYROID GLAND IN YOUTH*

Abstract

OUR attention was forcibly directed to the problem of thyroid cancer in young individuals by the recent simultaneous observation of 3 “teen-agers” with this disease, 1 of whom gave a history of a lateral cervical mass which had been under a physician's observation for a period of nine years. Although in 1935 Kennedy (1) could collect but 6 cases from the American medical literature of the preceding twenty years, reports since then have been more numerous and several authors have placed especial emphasis on the occurrence of thyroid cancer in youthful patients (2–6). Duffy and Fitzgerald (7) have recently published an excellent review of 28 cases in patients 18 years of age or less, from the Memorial Hospital. The 28 cases in this age group represented 6.5 per cent of a total of 430 thyroid carcinomas. For the most part, previous papers have dealt with the disease in children, each author setting his own upper age limit of childhood. Our study is concerned with patients 25 years of age or younger at the time the diagnosis of thyroid carcinoma was made. We have arbitrarily limited our group for three reasons: first, because we have encountered approximately as many thyroid cancers in the first half of the third decade as in the entire first two decades of life; second, the clinical and pathologic manifestations of the disease in patients in their early twenties appear very similar to those seen in younger patients; and, third, patients first treated when they are 20 to 25 years of age frequently give a history of having had the initial manifestations of the disease in childhood.