Abstract: Background: Thyroid swelling continues to be prevalent in various parts of India. The swellings are to be clinically detected initially followed by imaging and tissue diagnosis. The main objective of the study was to observe clinical presentations of the thyroid swellings and to correlate the clinical diagnosis with that of pathological diagnosis. To study the spectrum of clinical presentations of thyroid swellings and the accuracy of FNAC in the diagnosis of thyroid swellings.
Materials and Methods: Patients with obvious thyroid swellings were included in a prospective study which was conducted for a year in a tertiary centre. Various entities like clinical examination, ultrasonological studies and tissue diagnosis were included.
Results: Out of the 65 patients included in the study, incidence of thyroid swellings was much higher in the age distribution between 30-50 years. On ultrasonographic studies, 18 patients were radiologically diagnosed with carcinoma thyroid and colloid goiter each, constituting 27.7% of the total. Another 17 cases were diagnosed with multinodular goitre with 26.2%, 4 cases with thyroiditis (6%), 3 cases with solitary thyroid nodule and hashimotos thyroiditis each (4.6%) and 2 cases of colloid cyst (3.1%). On comparison of clinical diagnosis with FNAC, of 22 cytologically diagnosed malignant cases, 16 cases were clinically diagnosed. On correlation of the histopathological findings of 65 cases with that of the fine needle aspiration cytology,60 cases matched the reports with each other, with accuracy rate of 92.30%.Whereas, of the remianing 5 cases, 3 were of follicular adenoma and of 2 cytologically diagnosed colloid cyst showed up to be colloid goitre.
Conclusion: Thyroid swellings are more predominantly seen in female gender in the age group of 30- 50 years. Most of the swellings are benign in nature, of which colloid goitre is the most common in our study. Fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) is a valuable and cost effective pre-operative investigation for thyroid swellings. Surgical management is the definite treatment for thyroid swellings, of which total thyroidectomy is the most preferable type in our centre.
