The researchers pointed out that the thyroid gland is central to metabolic control. Women are much more likely than men to have an overactive thyroid, a diagnosis faced by approximately 51 out of every 100,000 people every year, researchers said.
Jorgensen added that while thyroid cancer screening is an increasingly common practice, the new finding “does not justify increased screening for overactive thyroid disease.”
According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, the thyroid is a key hormonal gland that plays a major role in the metabolism, growth and maturation of the human body. It helps to regulate a variety of functions by constantly releasing a steady stream of hormones into the bloodstream.
Dr. Courtney Vito, a breast surgeon and an assistant clinical professor of surgical oncology at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte, Calif., said it would be a mistake to make too much out of the study findings.
“First of all, this is a very homogenous group of women,” she said of the Danish participants. “There would never be a study group like that in the U.S., where there is a lot of ethnic variation and we are a much more heterogeneous population. So, these findings might not be generalizable across other populations.”
“There were also plenty of flaws in the study design,” Vito added. For example, she noted that “high thyroid levels were only shown to have estrogen-like properties in a test tube, not in actual people. And they [the researchers] didn’t take into account family breast cancer histories, and didn’t comment on how bad anyone’s thyroid disease actually was.