New study suggests that being a breast cancer survivor has an increased chance of being diagnosed with thyroid cancer later.
In fact, the risk of thyroid cancer is higher than the general population or those who didn't undergo breast cancer.
This information has been one of the highlights during the recent ENDO conference held on March 7. This meeting is attended by specialists, doctors, and other health care professionals belonging to the endocrine society.
Based on the article published in Medscape, the data was based on the analyses of almost a million records of women diagnosed with breast cancer from 1973 to 2011. The researchers also looked into the more than 50,000 records of women with thyroid cancer. These records were all stored in the SEER Database, which currently has around 9% of the entire population of the United States. Over 1,500 of these women, meanwhile, developed thyroid cancer after they survived breast cancer.
Women who are younger are more than likely to be diagnosed later with thyroid cancer, according to the same analyses. Within a decade, the risk of having thyroid cancer is around 16% for women who are 40 years old. It lowers to 12% for those who are already 50. However, when compared to the odds of thyroid cancer among the general population of the same age, the difference is huge. A 40-year-old woman with no breast cancer, for example, has a thyroid cancer risk of less than .50%.
The size of tumor may also be an indication of the risk. When compared to women who developed thyroid cancer without going through breast cancer, those who did developed a small breast tumor size.
Breast cancer survivors, moreover, are more likely to develop anaplastic thyroid cancer, which is hard to treat, or a certain type of follicular cancer.
It still remains unclear as to why the risk becomes high. Some speculated that it has something to do with exposure to radiation. Others think that the cancer may have been there all along, detected due to frequent scanning and examinations while managing breast cancer.