The Doctor José Molina Orosa University Hospital, a center attached to the Ministry of Health of the Government of the Canary Islands, recently organized a course focused on radiofrequency ablation of benign thyroid nodules, which was attended by health professionals from different Spanish hospitals.
The training meeting, organized by the Radiodiagnosis service of Molina Orosa, lasted two days. Throughout these two sessions, Dr. Castellanos, with an accredited experience in this field, instructed the attendees in a technique to treat benign thyroid nodules, an alternative technique to surgery that has proven to be effective and offers very beneficial results for patients.
Specialists from the university hospitals of Salamanca, Badajoz, Basurto and the General Hospital of Valencia attended the course. On the first day, the presentations took place, while on Friday three clinical cases of patients from Molina Orosa were studied.
According to the speaker of this training activity, “it is a very precise procedure, guided by the images of the ultrasound, with a very short duration, which ranges between 45 and 90 minutes”. The ablation of the nodule is performed, after introducing the radiofrequency needle percutaneously, by the progressive heating of the tissues around the active tip for a period of time that ranges between four and eight minutes. “This technique has a very good clinical response and a high degree of satisfaction with the results in patients”, explains the specialist.
Thyroid nodules are a very common health problem that can cause dysphagia, breathing problems and other complications. Thermoablation of the same, compared to surgical intervention, is a minimally aggressive procedure that does not require general anesthesia or hospital admission and has hardly any side effects and also leaves no scars. On the contrary, its effects are very positive for the patient with a reduction of between 50 and 60 percent of the size of the nodule in the three months following its performance and up to more than 90 percent one year after treatment.
48 interventions
The Radiology service of Molina Orosa launched this procedure in 2020 and since then has performed a total of 48 interventions aimed at treating benign thyroid nodules by radiofrequency.
The majority of the patients treated have been women, 42 compared to six men, and the average age is 48.8 years. In all cases, a reduction of more than 85 percent in the initial size of the nodule has been found one year after the intervention, as well as a high degree of recovery and satisfaction of the patients.
From the Radiology service, they emphasize the benefits of radiofrequency ablation as an alternative to traditional therapy and value the possibilities it opens to interdisciplinary collaboration with other medical services. In addition, they point out that this technique could be used in tumors of the liver, lung and kidney and even its use is frequent and very effective in some bone tumors.
