Justification of conservative surgical treatment of childhood thyroid cancer: report of eleven cases and analysis of Japanese literature.

Eleven thyroid carcinoma patients of 15 years old and under are reported. They represent only 1.3% of our personal series of 861 thyroid carcinoma cases. One case died from undifferentiated carcinoma of the thyroid. However, the other 10 cases of papillary or follicular carcinoma are all alive, in spite of the apparently advanced stage of the disease at the time of operation in most of the cases. From our experience and analysis of 127 cases of childhood thyroid cancer reported in the Japanese literature, it is suggested that childhood thyroid cancer constitutes an extreme case of thyroid cancer occurring in the adolescent and young adult periods, and that rather conservative surgical treatment, avoiding total laryngectomy, and preserving the recurrent laryngeal nerve and the parathyroid glands as far as possible, usually suffices for treatment. In these Japanese cases, radiation did not appear to have been an important causative factor of childhood thyroid cancer.