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International patterns and trends in thyroid cancer incidence, 1973–2002

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Abstract

During the past several decades, an increasing incidence of thyroid cancer has been reported in many parts of the world. To date, no study has compared the trends in thyroid cancer incidence across continents. We examined incidence data from cancer incidence in five continents (CI5) over the 30-year period 1973–2002 from 19 populations in the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania. Thyroid cancer rates have increased from 1973–1977 to 1998–2002 for most of the populations except Sweden, in which the incidence rates decreased about 18% for both males and females. The average increase was 48.0% among males and 66.7% among females. More recently, the age-adjusted international thyroid cancer incidence rates from 1998 to 2002 varied 5-fold for males and nearly 10-fold for females by geographic region. Considerable variation in thyroid cancer incidence was present for every continent but Africa, in which the incidence rates were generally low. Our analysis of published CI5 data suggests that thyroid cancer rates increased between 1973 and 2002 in most populations worldwide, and that the increase does not appear to be restricted to a particular region of the world or by the underlying rates of thyroid cancer.

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Acknowledgment

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health training grant TU2CA105666 and National Institutes of Health Fogarty training grant 2043TW007864-01.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yale School of Public Health, Yale University, 60 College Street, LEPH 440, P.O. Box 208034, New Haven, CT, 06520, USA

    Briseis A. Kilfoy, Tongzhang Zheng, Theodore R. Holford, Xuesong Han, Yaqun Zhang, Yana Bai, Cairong Zhu & Yawei Zhang

  2. Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, US Department of Health and Human Services, Rockville, MD, USA

    Briseis A. Kilfoy, Mary H. Ward & Nathaniel Rothman

  3. Division of Laboratory Sciences (DLS), Organic Analytical Toxicology Branch (OATB), National Center for Environmental Health (NCEH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 4770 Buford Highway NE, Atlanta, GA, 30341, USA

    Andreas Sjodin

  4. Gansu Provincial Design and Research Institute of Environmental Science, Lanzhou, Gansu, China

    Yaqun Zhang

  5. School of Public Health, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu, China

    Yana Bai

  6. School of Public Health, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China

    Cairong Zhu

  7. Department of Pharmacology, Toxicology and Therapeutics, University of Kansas Medical Cancer, Kansas City, KS, USA

    Grace L. Guo

Authors
  1. Briseis A. Kilfoy
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  2. Tongzhang Zheng
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  3. Theodore R. Holford
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  4. Xuesong Han
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  5. Mary H. Ward
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  6. Andreas Sjodin
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  7. Yaqun Zhang
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  8. Yana Bai
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  9. Cairong Zhu
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  10. Grace L. Guo
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  11. Nathaniel Rothman
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  12. Yawei Zhang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yawei Zhang.

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Kilfoy, B.A., Zheng, T., Holford, T.R. et al. International patterns and trends in thyroid cancer incidence, 1973–2002. Cancer Causes Control 20, 525–531 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10552-008-9260-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10552-008-9260-4

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