Hazard ratios of second primary malignancy after radioiodine for differentiated thyroid carcinoma: a large-cohort retrospective study.

Introduction: The objective of this study is to evaluate the benefits of radioactive iodine (RAI) treatment and the risk of second primary malignancy (SPM) in RAI-treated patients.

Material and methods: The cohort for this analysis consisted of individuals diagnosed with a first primary differentiated thyroid carcinoma (DTC), reported by the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database in 1988-2016. Overall survival (OS) difference was estimated by Kaplan-Meier curves and log-rank test, and hazard ratios (HR) were obtained by Cox proportional-hazards model to evaluate the association between RAI and SPM.

Results: Among 130,902 patients, 61,210 received RAI and 69,692 did not, and a total of 8604 patients developed SPM. We found that OS was significantly higher in patients who received RAI than in those who did not (p < 0.001). DTC survivors treated with RAI had increased risk of SPM in females (p = 0.043), particularly for SPM occurring in the ovary (p = 0.039) and leukaemia (p < 0.0001). The risk of developing SPM was higher in the RAI group than in the non-RAI group and the general population, and the incidence increased with age.

Conclusions: Increased risk of SPM occurs in female DTC survivors treated with RAI, which become more obvious with increasing age. Our research findings were beneficial to the formulation of RAI treatment strategies and the prediction of SPM for patients with thyroid cancer of different genders and different ages.