Researchers pinned the recent surge of thyroid cases on over diagnosis and treatment of tumors that are to small the be health-threatening.
Research suggests some of cancers that affect the breast, prostate, lung, and thyroid, are too slow-growing to be dangerous, the Associated Press reported.
Thyroid cancer cases have appeared to triple since the 1970s. Eighty-five percent of thyroid cancer patients have the gland removed, even though guidelines suggest less-aggressive treatments in many cases.
"Our old strategy of looking as hard as possible to find cancer has some real side effects," Doctor Gilbert Welch, co-author of the thyroid study and a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, told the Associated Press.
About 60,000 cases were diagnosed last year, which is a relatively low number, but the amount of cases has significantly spiked over the past few decades.
"Thyroid cancer even if treated has a fairly high recurrence rate even if it doesn't kill," Doctor Brian Burkey, a Cleveland Clinic head and neck cancer specialist, told the Associated Press.
An increasing number of patients are having their heads and necks imaged in search of evidence pointing to tumors.
"This means that a lot of people are having their thyroids removed for a cancer that was never going to bother them," Welch told HealthDay.
Welch believed patients should have the option of "watchful waiting" as prostate cancer patients do.
"We have to be really cautious that we don't create more problems than we solve. We will be looking hard at the question of watchful waiting for small papillary thyroid cancers, and we are going to be asking hard questions about whether we should even be looking for them," Welch told HealthDay.
Until we learn to accept small thyroid cancers as less worrisome than we now consider them to be and educate our patients about the non-lethal nature of the disease, the upward trend in thyroid cancer diagnosis and treatment will continue," Doctor David Cooper, a professor of medicine and radiology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told HealthDay.
