In the future, 1 in 5 cases of thyroid cancer will be attributable to overweight and obesity, and although women develop thyroid cancers three times as many as men, excess weight is more likely to cause the disease in men: if in sex being obese in men would explain two out of five thyroid cancers, in fact, in women, body fat would be the cause of one in ten. To say this is an Australian study published in the International Journal of Cancer, the first to have statistically evaluated the burden of disease attributable in the future to body weight based on current obesity data and to have investigated differences based on sex. “It is not yet clear what underlies the difference in risk of getting overweight / obesity-related thyroid cancer between the two sexes – the authors said – however our results add evidence to the urgent need to stop and reverse the disease. current global trend towards weight gain, and in particular obesity, especially in men “.
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Thyroid cancer, new treatment on the horizon for rare and aggressive forms
The strength of associations
The publication we are talking about, which in absolute terms has led to the prediction of 10,000 cases of thyroid cancer in Australia in the next 10 years due to obesity – was made taking into account seven cohort studies involving a total of 370,000 men and women. , and which made it possible to evaluate in perspective the incidence of several relatively rare cancers, such as thyroid cancer. Simplifying, the authors cross-referenced body mass index (BMI) data with cancer and mortality data collected in national databases, “which allowed us to estimate the strength of associations between BMI and cancer and between BMI. and deaths during follow-up, “explained Maarit Laaksonen, professor of data science at the School of Mathematics and Statistics at South Wales University in Sydney and first signer of the study.
The authors used the PAF method (PAF stands for Population Attributable Fractions) which, in summary, allows to evaluate, avoiding the risk of bias, the disease burden associated with a factor (body weight) and to compare the burden of disease. preventable for subgroups of the population, in this case for men and women. “In the end – continued Laaksonen – we multiplied the PAF estimates by the expected number of thyroid cancers in the next ten years (2021-2030) to obtain the absolute number of thyroid cancers that should occur due to weight”.
But if – according to forecasts and numbers – one in 5 cancers will be due to obesity, what will the other 4 be due to? “It’s not clear what causes the remaining four out of five cases,” the data scientist said. Other lifestyle factors do not seem to play a significant role “.
Cancer, in Italy people die less than in the rest of Europe. But with Covid, the diagnosis comes late
by Irma D’Aria
Thyroid cancer in Italy and in the world
In 2020, more than 580,000 new cases of thyroid cancer were diagnosed worldwide. Thyroid cancer is therefore today the ninth most common malignancy in the world and its incidence is three times higher in women than in men. Thyroid tumors include differentiated, medullary and anaplastic forms: the former make up about 90-95% of cases and in turn include papillary, follicular and Hürthle cell forms
In our country, again in 2020, about 13,200 new diagnoses of thyroid cancer were estimated, 9,900 involved women and 3,300 men. The 5-year survival is very high, and in both males and females it exceeds 90-92%.
The risk factors
According to some estimates, 10-15 percent of the thyroid glands examined at autopsy would have an undiagnosed thyroid tumor in life: as if to say that we are talking about a disease more common than you think, but which is evidently often asymptomatic, slow to grow and minimally invasive. Among the risk factors of papillary and follicular thyroid tumors, which are the most common, is iodine deficiency which leads to the formation of benign nodules, but which in some cases can predispose to malignant transformation and exposure to radiation. , both for medical reasons (thyroid cancer is more common among people who have undergone radiotherapy treatments to the neck) and for accidents involving exposure to radioactive material (see the disaster at the? ernobyl nuclear power plant). The effect of radiation is especially accentuated in the pediatric age, and therefore when possible, children and adolescents should be avoided even with CT scans and x-rays, especially if they affect the neck. Finally, among the risk factors for well-differentiated tumors there is also that of having a close relative who has had the disease.
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