Cardiac Metastasis of Thyroid Cancer

Anaplastic thyroid carcinomas (ATC) are very aggressive cancers. The median survival is 4 to 5 months and the long survival is rare. Fifteen to 50 percent of the patients with anaplastic carcinoma have extensive local invasion and distant metastases at initial presentation of the disease (1). In 90% of the cases, lungs and pleura are sites of distant metastasis. Other metastatic sites are bone, brain, skin, liver, kidney, pancreas, adrenal glands, and heart. The cardiac tumors are rare. Secondary tumors of the heart are found more frequently than primary tumors. Any cancer may metastasize to the heart. The autopsy series show that there is heart metastatis in patients with leukemia, melanoma, thyroid cancer, lung cancer, sarcomas, renal cell carcinoma, esophageal cancer, lymphoma, and breast cancer. Cardiac metastasis of thyroid cancer is uncommon even in autopsies (2, 3). Antemortem diagnosis of this clinical status is rare. There are thirteen cases of thyroid cancer with heart metastasis have reported in the literature 25 years ago (4). Herein, we present a case of ATC with metastatic involvement of the heart.