What is recurrence?

It sometimes appears that thyroid cancer has been completely eradicated after treatment with thyroid surgery and radioactive iodine. Follow-up radioactive iodine scans and thyroglobulin blood tests may not show any evidence of thyroid cancer over the course of long periods of evaluation. Then, at some point, something may show up on physical examination or follow-up testing that raises a suspicion that thyroid cancer cells are once again present. If further evaluation confirms this suspicion, the newly discovered cells are said to represent a recurrence of the thyroid cancer. Actually, the discovery rarely represents the development of a new or different form of thyroid cancer. More likely, the thyroid cancer cells from the original tumor were not completely eradicated by the initial treatment, but persisted in small numbers that were not detectable with normal methods of evaluation.

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