Epidemiological trends in thyroid diseases (regional register)

Purpose of the study. Epidemiological characterization and analysis of morphological features of thyroid (TH) diseases according to the data of surgical interventions performed over 10 years (from 2006 to 2015). Material and methods. The study represents a retrospective analysis of the morphological findings in 4680 patients who received surgical treatment for thyroid disease. All patients were treated in surgical departments of Kursk hospitals (Regional Clinical Hospital No.4, Regional Clinical Oncological Dispensary, Regional Clinical Hospital, City Hospital No.1, and Regional Perinatal Center) from 2006 to 2015. Morphological assessment of the surgical material was performed in the Kursk Regional Pathology Office. During the studied period, this institution was the only one in the region to perform morphological diagnostics, which, in fact, made it possible to analyze all cases of surgical intervention performed on the thyroid gland in different institutions of the city. All studied patients were stratified according to their sex and age: 3967 women and 713 men aged 5 to 86 years. The mean age of the patients was 49.0±9.5 years.

Results. Among all patients operated on for thyroid diseases, women prevailed. Only among the patients operated on for metastatic cancer the gender composition was balanced with some predominance of women. The total number of patients operated on for thyroid diseases in 2015 was 1.9 times lower than in 2006. Despite the overall decrease in the number of patients operated on, there has been a tendency for this number to grow again since 2013. This upward trend arose due to an increase in the number of patients operated on for nontoxic and toxic goiter. The number of patients operated on for benign tumors decreased. The total number of patients operated on for cancer decreased slightly. This was due to a decrease in the number of patients operated on for papillary cancer, although this indicator began to increase again between 2013 and 2015. The share of nontoxic and toxic goiter among thyroid diseases increased. Nontoxic goiter prevailed over benign thyroid tumors from 2006 to 2015, shifting their share to second place. The share of thyroid cancer among other thyroid diseases remained unchanged despite the decrease in the absolute number of patients. Cancer still takes the third place among all thyroid diseases for which the patients received surgical treatment from 2006 to 2015. A decreasing trend in the number of surgeries performed for thyroiditis was present with subsequent stabilization of this indicator. Papillary cancer patients are consistently predominant among the total number, although there was a slight increase in follicular and metastatic cancer cases. Anaplastic and medullary carcinomas had shown consistently low rates over the period from 2006 to 2015. The most frequent primary cancer localization in thyroid metastasis in our cohort were brain tumors.

Key words: thyroid gland, epidemiology, morbidity, mortality, toxic goiter, non-toxic goiter, surgical intervention
Conflicts of interest. The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. Funding. There was no funding for this study.