Current surgical status of thyroid diseases

Panagiotis Touzopoulos¹, Michael Karanikas¹, Paul Zarogoulidis², Alexandros Mitrakas¹, Konstantinos Porpodis², Nikolaos Katsikogiannis³, Vasilis Zervas², Ioannis Kouroumichakis⁴, Theodoros C Constantinidis⁵, Dimitrios Mikroulis⁶, Konstantinos E Tsimogiannis^7
1First Surgery Department, University General Hospital of Alexandroupolis, Democritus University of Alexandroupolis, Greece; ²Pulmonary Department, "G. Papanikolaou" General Hospital, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece; ³Surgery Department (NHS), University General Hospital of Alexandroupolis, Greece; ⁴Second Internal Medicine Department, University General Hospital of Alexandroupolis, Democritus University of Thrace, Alexandroupolis, Greece; ⁵Medical School, Laboratory of Hygiene and Environmental Protection, Democritus University of Thrace, Regional Laboratory of Public Health, Eastern Macedonia-Thrace, Greece; ⁶Cardiothoracic Surgery Department, General University Hospital of Alexandroupolis, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece; ⁷Surgery Department, "G. Hatzikosta" General Hospital of Ioannina, Greece

Abstract: Thyroid nodules are a common clinical problem for surgeons. The clinical importance of nodules is the need to exclude thyroid cancer, which occurs in 5%–15% of patients. If fine needle aspiration cytology is positive, or suspicious for malignancy, surgery is recommended. During the past decade, with the tendency to develop smaller incisions, an endoscopic approach has been applied to thyroid surgery, called minimally invasive video-assisted thyroidectomy. This approach was immediately followed by other minimally invasive or scarless neck techniques, such as the breast approach, axillary-breast approach, and robot-assisted method. All these techniques follow the same principles of surgery and oncology. This review presents the current surgical management of the thyroid gland, including the surgical techniques and compares them by describing benefits and drawbacks of each one.

Keywords: thyroidectomy, surgical techniques, thyroid cancer