Defining Survivorship in the Thyroid Cancer Space

Melanie Goldfarb, MD, MSc, FACS, FACE, FSSO, Center for Endocrine Tumors, Providence Saint John's Cancer Institute, discusses the importance of survivorship and providing care to patients with thyroid cancer.

There have recently been multiple articles and symposiums highlighting the importance of survivorship for patients with thyroid cancer. According to Goldfarb, survivorship is defined as the time from diagnosis.

It is important to highlight this topic as long-term survivorship care aids in reducing anxiety, emergency hospital visits, and health care costs, for patients across various cancer types, including thyroid cancer.

Transcription:

0:08 | There's been a couple different articles and symposiums proposed and finally [last] year, we [had] a full survivorship symposium, which is really exciting. It’s important because anybody that gets thyroid cancer is a thyroid cancer survivor, so survivorship is from the time of diagnosis. Even more so for thyroid cancer patients, they live a lifetime for the most part, so every year there's more and more thyroid cancer survivors.

0:43 | But even if you're surviving, that doesn't mean that you don't have physical, emotional, psychosocial, and things going on that are important to be acknowledged, addressed, and dealt with. In the cancer community until 10-15 years ago on all cancers, it was like, great, let's keep you alive. But now as more and more people are survivors and living longer, what survivorship means and all the other things are coming to the forefront.

1:17 | Same thing especially in the thyroid world, because they're not usually taken care of in the oncology space. All of these survivorship things are not always available or not always brought up. [Experts say,] you have thyroid cancer, great, you're done, and don't acknowledge that a lot of the patients have a lot of other things going on.