Radioiodine Therapy: Malignant Thyroid Disease.

It was more than 60 years ago in 1943 that thyroid cancer was treated for the first time. The story of radioiodine started in 1935 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in cooperation with the Thyroid Unit of the Massachusetts General Hospital (Stanbury 1991). Diagnostic thyroid studies were performed for the first time in 1937 using iodine-128. In 1938, not more than 1 year later, I-130 and I-131 were discovered, followed by the first treatment of benign thyroid disease in 1941. In 1946 the Oak Ridge National Laboratory produced I-131 for routine use and from this time on I-131 treatment was increasingly performed not only in benign thyroid diseases but also in differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC). It was as early as 1949 that a patient with metastasizing thyroid cancer was treated for the first time in Europe. With 1 - 2 % of all malignancies, thyroid cancer is counted among the rare neoplastic diseases (Langsteger et al. 1993). The incidence of thyroid cancer is variable in different regions but is increasing worldwide. The figures range from 1.1 in the UK up to 15.4/100,000/year in Hawaii. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]