A Review on Molecular Biomarkers of Thyroid Carcinoma

Thyroid carcinoma is the most common endocrine neoplasia. Like other cancers, early detection of thyroid cancer plays an important role in the treatment and prevention of disease progression. In recent years many efforts have been made to detect molecular biomarkers for early prediction, diagnosis, and prognosis of different types of cancers. This article is a review on different researches about biomarkers of thyroid cancers. Original articles published (between 1996 and 2015) about biomarkers and thyroid cancers were identified by searching different databases. According to different types of thyroid cancers, the articles were reviewed in different four sections. In most cases FNA could determine the nature of thyroid nodules. However, this method is faced with some limitations especially in detection of lesions associated with follicular thyroid cells. To optimize the accuracy of diagnosis and to offer new prognostic criteria, several immunohistochemical and molecular markers have been proposed which should be verified before clinical application. In spite of large volumes of data about discovery of different biomarkers for thyroid cancers, few of them could be used in clinical applications. In many cases using each of these molecules alone may not be useful, therefore, combination of two or more biomarkers could be of great help in diagnosis, prognosis and prediction of thyroid cancer.