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Differentiated thyroid carcinoma in lingual thyroid

  • Clinical Management of Endocrine Diseases
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Abstract

The lingual thyroid is the most common form of thyroid ectopy. The ectopic tissue may display any disease affecting the thyroid, including malignancies, which have an estimated incidence of less than 1 %. To date only 51 cases of lingual thyroid cancer were reported. Analogously to what observed in orthotopic thyroid, papillary carcinoma is the predominant histotype in lingual thyroid carcinoma. The higher frequency of lingual follicular thyroid carcinoma previously reported is possibly related to histological misclassification in some early reports, prior to the standardization of histological typing of differentiated thyroid carcinomas. Nonetheless, the frequency of the follicular histotype is not negligible, accounting for about one-third of the reported cases. Both natural history and prognosis of lingual thyroid carcinoma are poorly known, likely because of the rarity of the disease and the heterogeneity in the therapeutic approach. However, among the cases more recently reported, surgical excision of the mass, either alone or followed by radioiodine ablation, is the first-line approach, with only two cases treated by radioiodine alone. The nonsignificant rate of neoplastic transformation in lingual thyroid should encourage efforts to obtain a widely accepted consensus for the management of this rare condition, along with standardization of either diagnostic or therapeutic handling of malignancies arising in ectopic thyroid.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge Prof. Vittorio Cavallari, pathologist, for providing histological diagnosis and images, and Prof. Francesco Trimarchi for his erudite and critical review of the manuscript.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Medicina Clinica e Sperimentale, University of Messina, Via Consolare Valeria 1, 98100, Messina, Italy

    Giacomo Sturniolo, Maria Antonia Violi, Francesco Vermiglio & Mariacarla Moleti

  2. Dipartimento di Scienze Sperimentali Medico-Chirurgiche Specialistiche ed Odontostomatologiche, University of Messina, Via Consolare Valeria 1, 98100, Messina, Italy

    Bruno Galletti

  3. Dipartimento di Scienze Biomediche e delle Immagini Morfologiche e Funzionali, University of Messina, Via Consolare Valeria 1, 98100, Messina, Italy

    Sergio Baldari & Alfredo Campennì

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  1. Giacomo Sturniolo
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Correspondence to Francesco Vermiglio.

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Sturniolo, G., Violi, M.A., Galletti, B. et al. Differentiated thyroid carcinoma in lingual thyroid. Endocrine 51, 189–198 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12020-015-0593-y

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