Preservation of Parathyroid Gland During Thyroid Surgery

Abstract

Twenty patients with different thyroid pathology were included in the present work in order to evaluate the value of toluidine blue injection into the inferior thyroid artery for preservation of the parathyroid glands and guard against postoperative transient and permanent hypocalcemia. - Fifteen patients were females and five were males with a ratio of 3:1 and their range of age was 19-50 years. Ten patients suffered from simple goiter, seven patients presented with toxic goiter and three patients with malignant goiter. The operations done were, seven total thyroidectomies (three malignant goiter and four simple), eight subtotal thyroidectomies (seven toxic and one simple goiter) and five hemi-thyroidectomies (all of them were simple goiter). All patients were subjected to complete history taking, clinical examination, laboratory evaluation including pre and postoperative (one week and one month) estimation of serum calcium (by calorimetric method), phosphorus (by the spectrophotometry method) and parathormone (by the immunoradiometric assay method).