Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Tests and diagnosis
By Mayo Clinic staffIf your doctor suspects Hurthle cell cancer, the first steps will be to obtain your medical history and conduct a physical exam. Your doctor will examine your neck, checking the size of your thyroid and seeing whether lymph nodes in the neck are swollen. He or she will also likely order blood tests to check your thyroid function.
To help make a definite diagnosis, your doctor may recommend one or more of the following tests:
-
Ultrasound scan. This painless imaging technique, also called a sonogram, uses high-frequency sound waves to outline the neck anatomy and detect a thyroid tumor. A doctor or person who is trained to perform ultrasound exams (sonographer) will place gel on your neck and then place a hand-held transducer on the area. The transducer transmits sound waves into the neck region and sends information to a computer to create a series of pictures of the thyroid — including images of its shape and size.
While very good at identifying whether a tumor is present, ultrasound scans can't tell for sure whether a growth or nodule is malignant or benign. Ultrasound is safe, with virtually no complications associated with its use.
-
Fine-needle aspiration (FNA) biopsy. This test may determine whether a tumor or nodule is cancerous or noncancerous. In this procedure, you lie down and the doctor passes a fine needle through the skin of your neck. Your doctor may use ultrasound imaging to help direct the needle into the tumor. As the needle is withdrawn, cellular material is taken out (aspirated). Then the process is repeated to obtain cells from several regions of the growth.
These cell samples are placed on glass slides and sent to a laboratory for microscopic analysis to determine whether the nodule is cancerous. In many instances, the results of the biopsy are inconclusive, and the test may need to be repeated or surgical removal of the nodule may be necessary to confirm whether cancer is present. Most tumors turn out to be benign.
Fine-needle aspiration can be performed in your doctor's office or at an ambulatory surgical center. Because the needle is very thin (much thinner than a needle used to withdraw blood from your arm), it causes only slight discomfort. Your doctor may apply a local anesthetic to the area to eliminate any chance of pain. Some people experience a small amount of temporary bleeding, bruising or swelling at the site where the needle was inserted.
You won't need to do much preparation for either of these tests. No fasting is required. In most cases, you won't need to stop taking any medications.
Other diagnostic tests also may be used, including:
- Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
- Computerized tomography (CT) scan
- Positron emission tomography (PET) scan
