What Are the Types of Thyroid Cancer?
What Are the Types of Thyroid Cancer? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What are the types of thyroid cancer? Dr. Wirth explains the various subtypes, including common forms like papillary and follicular thyroid cancer, as well as rarer types like anaplastic thyroid cancer.
Dr. Lori Wirth is the Medical Director of the Center for Head and Neck Cancers at Massachusetts General Hospital. Learn more about Dr. Wirth.
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Transcript:
Katherine:
Dr. Wirth, can you walk us through the types of thyroid cancer?
Dr. Wirth:
Yes, I can. So, there is actually an array of different types of thyroid cancer in terms of different histologies or subtypes of thyroid cancer as well as different natural histories. So, the most common thyroid cancers are derived from the follicular thyroid cell that makes thyroid hormone and does the business of the thyroid gland.
That progenitor cell or thyroid cell can give rise to several different types of thyroid cancer. The most common is papillary thyroid cancer. And then we can also see other thyroid cancers arising from those thyroid cells including follicular thyroid cancer, and oncocytic thyroid cancer, or high-grade thyroid cancers, and even a cancer called anaplastic thyroid cancer.
And then there’s one other type of cell within the thyroid gland which is called a parafollicular C cell. It’s a completely different type of cell from the other more common thyroid cells. And parafollicular C cells can give rise to a subtype of thyroid cancer called medullary thyroid cancer that really doesn’t have anything in common with the other types of thyroid cancer except for the fact that it originates within the thyroid gland.
