Thyroid nodules 2006: managing what has been known for over 50 years.

The 50 anniversary of the publication of Mortensen, Woolner and Bennet’s paper entitled Gross and microscopic findings in clinically normal thyroid glands has just passed. Their paper reported that at autopsy at the Mayo Clinic approximately half of those not known to have thyroid disease pre-mortem had thyroid nodules (Table 1). Although we need to bear in mind that those who died of thyroid disease were excluded from the study, the vast majority of thyroid nodularity that was discovered at autopsy appeared to be clinically unimportant.