Is your thyroid on the fritz?

Kristin Angelov was 26 when the exhaustion hit. Getting up in the morning was a superhuman effort, a struggle compounded by her suddenly dismal mood.

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"I would be in meetings at work and feel so tired and dizzy, like I was going to pass out," she says. And though the once-energetic writer stuck to a healthy diet, she packed on five pounds in two weeks. What's more, whenever she stepped out into the cold, her fingernails and toes turned a faint shade of blue. She dragged herself to her primary-care doctor, who ran a series of tests. Kristin's big problems, her M.D. told her, stemmed from a small place--the thyroid gland in her neck.
Cancer on the rise
While incidences of some cancers, including breast and cervical, have been steadily dropping (hooray!), thyroid cancer is on the rise: An estimated 45,000 new cases were diagnosed last year, and 75 percent of those were in women, according to the American Cancer Society. What's more, the majority of sufferers are much younger than the typical cancer patient.
"Twenty-one percent of women who undergo surgery for thyroid cancer at our center are under the age of 35," says endocrine surgeon Keith Heller, M.D., of New York University Langone Medical Center. The encouraging news? If you are diagnosed and treated early, the cure rate is close to 99 percent.

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Experts theorize that doctors might be discovering more cases by accident during imaging procedures such as CT scans for problems like severe migraines. Or the culprit could be the CT scans themselves--frequent radiation exposure near the neck, especially in childhood, is a thyroid-cancer risk factor (routine dental X-rays and mammograms, however, are not). The best defense is a good offense:
As a general rule, see your doctor if you have a sore throat, hoarse voice, persistent cough, or trouble swallowing for more than two weeks, or if you find a lump in your neck.
If it is cancer, surgery to remove the thyroid is the norm. "I know that sounds scary, but the operation takes just two hours, and patients are often back at work within a few days," says Heller. Believe it or not, it's relatively painless to live without a thyroid:

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