Radioactive iodine studies of functional thyroid carcinoma.

THE HISTORY OF THE recognition of functional thyroid carcinoma goes back less than a century. The first pertinent recorded observation was roughly eighty years ago, when Muller (1) noted that a metastatic lesion in bone was strikingly similar to normal thyroid tissue. Approximately fifty years ago von Eiselsberg (2) described a case of thyroid cancer in which, following total thyroidectomy, hormonal balance was maintained by the activity of a destructive growing cancer involving the sternum. Five years ago we (3) reported the first case of metastatic thyroid carcinoma to be shown, by Geiger counter and radioautograph, to take up radioactive iodine. In a more detailed account, we later (4) reviewed briefly these studies and others of the last twenty years, including the historic paper published in 1940 by Hamilton and Soley (5), “Deposition of Radioactive Iodine in Human Thyroid Tissue.” In this paper the authors presented radioautographs of two thyroid carcinomas which failed to show uptake, and they made...