Abstract
Purpose Assessment of Serum Thyroglobulin (sTg) value in total thyroidectomy patients having an ablation dose of radioactive iodine indicates remaining cancer or metastasis. Especially, sTg in patients on withdrawal thyroxine or thyrogen administration for radioiodine ablation is an important indicator to determine the direction of further treatment and prognosis. Current guidelines suggest measurement of sTg is performed at 72 hours after the last injection of thyrogen. and assumes that sTg reaches maximum serum levels at that time. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the variation of sTg measured after thyrogen administration. Materials and Methods We compared with sTg performed at 24hours(D0) and 72hours(D2) after the last injection of thyrogen. We reviewed D0 and D2 from 276 patients were divided them into three groups according to ablation dose of radioactive iodine, 5mCi(A group), 30~80mCi(B group) and 100~200mCi(C group). We used T-test for comparison between D0 and D2. sTg was measured in serum using immunoradiometric assay (Tg-plus RIA; BRAHMS, Berlin, Germany). Results There is no critical variation between D0 and D2 in A group(n=100)(P=0.32), The case of increase(D2>D0) is 45, no change(D2=D0) is 23, decrease(D2D0 is 91, D2=D0 is 28, D2D0 is 19, D2=D0 is 2. The biggest increase is 143.6 ng/mL from 98.4 to 242. Conclusion There was a significant difference in the group over 30mCi. and the case of D2>D0 is 45%, 58.7%, 90.5% for each group. therefore, D2 increased as the dose of radioactive iodine increased. Furthermore, the most sTg values of D0 and D2 are variation under 2.0 ng/mL, so reproducibility as well as sensitivity of sTg will be important at values below 2ng/mL.
