How fast does thyroid cancer spread?
Dr. Rosen: We’re trying to put it into context, if you compare thyroid cancer that’s advanced to other types of cancers it’s incredibly slow growing, people can live with it for 10 to 20 years at a time. Tell that to someone who is 45 years old that they have a 10-year life span, so yes people can die of it. There are rare cases, not even 1 a year, that people will have lots of shortness of breath, or the cancer will be very rapidly growing and they could die within months or years of being diagnosed with the advanced part of the disease. What are typical treatments? Dr. Rosen: So right now 90 (+) percent of thyroid cancers are taken care of just by removing the thyroid gland, then doing a scan to see if there’s any residual thyroid cells somewhere floating around the system and using radioactive iodine as a single treatment to get rid of it. If the cancer were to come back, or at the moment it was diagnosed it was it was already spread, you could give repeated treatments of the radioa
