03/04/2022
The THANC Foundation, an American non-profit organization, has a new program. In the past, the organization concentrated on its Thyroid Care Collaborative (gathering patients’ data for research purposes), educational seminars, annually funding a medical student in a speciality (fellowship), annually conducting head and neck and oral cancer screenings, and an annual campaign of 30 days of thyroid cancer awareness with daily patients’ stories.
Recently they launched “Thyroid International Recommendations Online (TIRO)” which is an online portal with the “most cited thyroid nodule & thyroid cancer care recommendations”. That is, they provide links to and summary information about various international standards for care. For example, they take the recommendations of main authority organizations such as the ATA, AAES, ESMO, JAES, NCCN and distill or combine the recommendations into an easy-to-read format also with some good illustrations (see example here). Where there are differences in recommendations, they chart them side-by-side. This part of their website has mainly been written for MDs, but is in a format that patients may also find very useful. The international advisory board members for this project are well-respected MDs working in the field of TC and are listed on the site.
In ETC’s perusal of the TIRO website, there did not seem to be a lot of information about rare forms of TC, but this is more a reflection of what TIRO was able to make use of.
(ETC Note: Before writing this summary, I had a look at the THANC Foundation website including the TIRO pages and also at the organization’s 2019 financial report. As is often the case currently, a portion of their funding comes from the pharmaceutical industry, and the website does contain some advertisements from pharma as well as listing them as sponsors. It also provides information about clinical trials of some medications. ETC points this out as some people are uncomfortable with non-profits receiving pharma funding due possible or perceived influence or impartiality.)
LINK: https://bit.ly/3Jme3L7
