Introduction
Thyroid cancer happens at the bottom of the neck. The thyroid's main purpose is to create hormones for controlling things such as your body temp and blood pressure. The types of thyroid cancers include: differentiated, medullary, and anaplastic. The most common is differentiated, with its most common variant being known as papillary cancer. Papillary cancer grows slowly but usually spread to lymph nodes inside the neck. The lesser common varaint of differentiated thyroid cancer, follicular cancer, doesn't usually spread to lymph nodes, but do spread to lungs and bones. Some variants of medullary thyroid include: sporatic (not inherited, in older people) and familial (inherited, in childhood). Anaplastic cancer spreads into the neck and throughout the body.
Mechanisms and genetic alterations
The most common mutated genes for thyroid cancer are BRAF, NRAS, HRAS, KMT2A, AMT, KMT2C, AKT1. The most common copy number alteration genes are CDKN2A, CDKN2B, CCND1, FGF19, FGF3.
Current thyroid cancer treatments
For papillary cancer, the thyroid gland is removed with surgery. Sometimes if the tumor hasn't grown far and/or large, just a part of the thyroid is removed. It is also sometimes recommended for lymph nodes around the thyroid to be removed, so the cancer won't go back there. After surgery, radioactive iodine treatment is often used with stage 3 and 4 cancers.
New treatments in clinical trials
