Head and neck endocrine surgeon Jonathon Russell recaps a panel discussion about two promising techniques for treating patients with symptomatic thyroid nodules: radiofrequency and ethanol ablation.
Hi, I'm John Russell. I'm a head neck endocrine surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital. I'm the director of endoscopic and robotic, thyroid and parathyroid surgery. And at the most recent academy meeting in the fall of 2020 we had a chance to be part of a panel discussing radio frequency ablation and alcohol ablation off thyroid nodules. And these are two of the most promising techniques that we see coming into the future and really changing how we take care of patients with symptomatic thyroid nodule. First alcohol ablation, alcohol ablation has been around forever, and really, what we're finding is where it is beneficial to patients, and the place that it's most beneficial to patients are patients who have a symptomatic, benign, cystic thyroid nodule. And those patients can have a great result from a very simple drainage of the of the cyst, followed by instilling a little bit of ethanol, retrieving the ethanol and then sending the patients on their way. But we had a discussion is a group about the value of that and how it can really take away a lot of the morbidity that is normally accompanied with treating these patients with surgery so that was the first technique. But that's been around for a long time. What we're really excited about is radio frequency ablation, because we haven't had a great way to treat patients with symptomatic thyroid nodules that air solid and radio frequency ablation actually fills that void. So when we have patients with benign nodules, oftentimes they get stuck in this position of saying it bothers me and I want to do something about it. But not bad enough that I want to do surgery. And for those patients doing a 30 minute in office procedure and knowing that they're nodule is going to shrink between 50 to 80% and knowing that they can go back to work the same day if they want Thio with very low risk, that's a very promising you can treatment option for a lot of patients. And it really moves a lot of patients from the position of thinking about treating their nodule to Yes, I want to do something about this thyroid nodule. And so that's really what we talked about for benign thyroid nodules. This has been we've We've had nothing but rave reviews from our patients of using this um, we're excited because there's a lot of potential in the future to use this, even for small cancers and for small indeterminant modules. Um, stay tuned. We've got hopefully at the next academy, meaning we'll be talking about our results with some of those as we move forward with future studies. So great meeting as always, and hopefully next year we could do it in person.
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