When patients with differentiated thyroid cancer relapse, reliance is placed on the radioactive iodine therapy programme. When a patient's disease no longer uptakes radiodine there is no further specific therapy that can be offered for metastatic disease and this also applies to undifferentiated carcinoma and medullary cancer.
Chemotherapy has not been successful in these diseases. ‘Salvage’ chemotherapy may have a role in lymphoma patients who relapse after the therapy outlined above.
