Thyroid

Thirteen million Americans have been diagnosed with various forms of thyroid disease. Among them were such famous people as former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, actress Catherine Bell, fiction writer Isaac Asimov, singer Rod Stewart, and actor Joe Piscopo.

Most of those who get the disease get it as a result of exposure to radiation. In 2003, NYC Health + Hospitals/Coney Island began aggressively screening patients from the former Soviet Union who may have been exposed to radiation during the Chernobyl Catastrophe in 1986. Statistics of screenings of hundreds of patients show that 20 years later:

• Autoimmune thyroiditis (Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an inflammation of the thyroid gland) is much higher than among non-exposed people
• Autoimmune thyroiditis noticeably increases the risk of malignant lympho-proliferated diseases
• The younger the individual was during the exposure and the closer he/she was to Chernobyl the more likely he or she is to develop complications including thyroid tumor and other thyroid disease
• Because thyroid cancer may not occur until 20 years after exposure to radiation, incidents of this disease are on the rise among Chernobyl survivors

Patients diagnosed with thyroid problems during the screening were successfully treated at NYC Health + Hospitals/Coney Island.

Thyroid (Endocrinology)

Location: 305
Hours: (New Patients) Wednesday 8:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.;
(Revisits) Wednesday 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
(New Patients and Revisits) Thursday 8:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Telephone: Call Center 1-844-UR-CONEY