Thyroid metastasis in a patient with hepatocellular carcinoma: case report and review of literature
- PDF / 950,039 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 610 x 792 pts Page_size
- 1 Downloads / 175 Views
Open Access
Case report
Thyroid metastasis in a patient with hepatocellular carcinoma: case report and review of literature Hung-Hua Liang1, Chih-Hsiung Wu1, Ka-Wai Tam1, Chiah-Yang Chai1, SeyEn Lin2 and Soul-Chin Chen*1 Address: 1Department of Surgery, Taipei Medical University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan and 2Department of Pathology, Taipei Medical University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan Email: Hung-Hua Liang - [email protected]; Chih-Hsiung Wu - [email protected]; Ka-Wai Tam - [email protected]; ChiahYang Chai - [email protected]; Sey-En Lin - [email protected]; Soul-Chin Chen* - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 24 December 2007 World Journal of Surgical Oncology 2007, 5:144
doi:10.1186/1477-7819-5-144
Received: 18 June 2007 Accepted: 24 December 2007
This article is available from: http://www.wjso.com/content/5/1/144 © 2007 Liang et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract Background: Despite the apparent low incidence of cancer metastatic to the thyroid, autopsy and clinical series suggest it is more common than generally. Although lung, renal, and breast cancer are probably the most common primary sites, a number of cancers have been reported to metastasize to the thyroid synchronously with diagnosis of primary tumor or years after apparently curative treatment. Case presentation: We report a rare case of a hepatocellular carcinoma metasatic to the thyroid. The patient presented seven months after original diagnosis and treatment with hepatic lobectomy with multiple neck lesions producing a mass effect on the trachea and bilateral lymphadenopathy. Fine-needle aspiration revealed highly anaplastic carcinoma, and immunohistochemistry confirmed hepatocellular carcinoma. The patient received total thyroidectomy as palliative therapy because of the presence of multiple recurrent lesions in the liver. Conclusion: Clinicians should consider the possibility of metastatic cancer in each patient who presents with a new thyroid mass, especially those with a history of cancer, however remote. In cases where cytology or histology is not diagnostic, immunohistochemistry may be definitive in making the diagnosis.
Background Although metastatic disease in the thyroid is infrequently seen, both autopsy and clinical series indicate the problem is more common than generally thought. Autopsy series on patients with cancer have yielded incidence rates ranging from 1.25% to as high as 24%, and some authors have suggested that the incidence of metastatic disease in the thyroid may have risen during the twentieth century
[1,2]. Recent reports suggest that the most common primary sites are the kidney, lung, breast, and gastrointestinal tract [1-7]. However, a wide variety of cancers may metastasize to the thyroid, including nasophar
Data Loading...
