Rise In Thyroid Cancer May Be Tied To Radiation

Some 1.4 million new cases of cancer are diagnosed every year. "A significant percentage of those with cancer survive especially when it is caught early," states Jesse Slome, executive director of the American Association for Critical Illness Insurance, the national trade organization.

According to the American Cancer Society, most cancers involve the breast, prostate, lung or colon. However, according to the organization's 2008 data, some four percent of cancers in women involved the thyroid.

Medical experts are unclear as to the cause of the increase. Overall cancer rates are falling creating the concern as to why are thyroid cancer rates rising?

Diagnoses of cancer in the thyroid gland that is located in the neck are increasing about 6% a year, faster than cancers found anywhere else, according to one National Cancer Institute analysis.

Researchers claim to know one big reason. They blame the many medical scans Americans have, for everything from neck pain to artery plaque. Scientists note that the scans are turning up thousands of tiny thyroid tumors that otherwise might go undetected and often would do no harm.

"We call them 'incidentalomas,' " says Amy Chen, a head and neck surgeon at Emory University in Atlanta and American Cancer Society researcher. Two recent studies, including one co-written by Chen, show larger thyroid tumors are being found at an increasing rate, too. And those can't be explained by more aggressive diagnosis alone, researchers say.