Abstract:
Differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) patients always holds a good prognosis under standard surgery, selective
131I therapy and TSH suppression therapy. The goals of
131I therapy are characterized as remnant ablation, adjuvant treatment, and treatment of known disease, which are supposed to refine initial staging, facilitate follow-up, decrease recurrence, and improve disease-specific survival. However, there are still many issues to be clarified in clinical practice. For example, in the assessment of postoperative disease status before
131I therapy, it is difficult to estimate subclinical lesions, and there is no Tg threshold to guide
131I therapy, which makes the decision of adjuvant treatment even harder. In the follow-up, there is no uniform response criterion for
131I therapy in structural disease, the presence of TgAb will interfere with the judgement of disease status;
131I cumulative dose-related complications also need to be monitored and managed. This issue contains several articles related to the
131I treatment of DTC patients, discusses the difficulties in current
131I treatment and the explorations of Chinese scholars in several aspects.