Investigating the effect of different high dose iodine-131 ablation therapies on disease prognosis in post-thyroidectomy patients

Abstract

Purpose: Patients diagnosed with Differentiated Thyroid Carcinoma, usually have a really good treatment progression and death rate is very low when compared with other tumours. The treatment usually consists of surgery to the thyroid gland followed by radioiodine131 ablation therapy. However according to literature, there is no particular optimal ablative dose and a range of doses are thus usually administered to treat this tumour, based on the Oncologist's recommendations. Objectives: The objective of the study was to investigate if there is a relationship between the amount of high dose iodine-131 ablation therapy administered in each case and disease prognosis. Another aim was to check if there is a relationship between the amount of iodine-131 ablation dose and number of ablations performed. Methodology: The research design for this study was a quantitative, retrospective and correlative one. It was also a non-experimental study. Forty patients diagnosed with differentiated thyroid carcinoma, and who had their first ablation therapy between January 2008 and August 2011 were eligible to participate in this research. All patients needed to have performed a total thyroidectomy not more than 2 months prior to their first ablation dose. Both genders were included, with a mean age of 45 years. The doses given to these patients ranged from 80mCi to 150mCi. Results: From the hypothesis testing carried out in this study, it resulted that 1 OOmCi could be the ideal dose for disease prognosis. It was also demonstrated that with a dose of 1 OOmCi, patients performed 1 ablation whilst other patients having 80mCi or higher doses needed to perform more than 1 ablation in most cases. Conclusion: Further research is recommended in order to produce more significant results. This is due to the low number of eligible participants present in this research and also because blood tests results were not considered in this research.