Pediatric thyroid nodules are more likely to develop a malignancy than adults and carry a greater risk for disease recurrence (Gupta et al., 2013) following near total thyroidectomy and adjunctive treatment. In disease management for all patients, consensus guidelines recommend serial measurement of serum thyroglobulin for surveillance after surgery, as it is a generally reliable tumor marker (Cooper et al., 2009). Literature addresses prevalence of interfering antibodies in the adult population (Spencer & Fatemi, 2013). There are virtually no studies available regarding this issue in the pediatric population.
We conducted a retrospective review of medical records to assess the prevalence of anti-thyroglobulin antibodies among patients (N = 101) < 18 years old who have sought care from specialists at our center's multidisciplinary thyroid nodule clinic. Our primary endpoints were 1) presence or absence of confounding antibodies at day of diagnosis 2) clearance or persistence of antibodies over the period of the study.
Our analysis showed that 31% of patients who met inclusion criteria tested positive for interfering antibodies at cancer diagnosis. Of these patients, 42% of patients achieved clearance an average of 13.5 months following surgery.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/15094 |
| Date | 22 January 2016 |
| Creators | Della Vecchia, Margaret C.E. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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