Evaluation of Thyroid Nodules

Thyroid nodules are very frequent findings, and their prevalence steadily increases with age. However, clinically significant thyroid cancer is a rare malignancy, and death from thyroid cancer is even less common with an estimated annual death rate of 0.25 per 100,000 in the US population. Moreover, the ever-increasing discovery of thyroid nodules by high-resolution radiological imaging procedures performed for other indications raises the problem of how incidentally discovered lesions should be investigated in a cost-effective and safe manner to identify the rare patient with a clinically significant malignancy.