Incidence of Morbidity Following Thyroid Surgery: Acceptable Morbidity Rates

The issue of complications of thyroid surgery is extremely difficult to consider due to the relative rarity of the complications themselves, when thyroidectomy is performed by an experienced surgeon. Almost every study present in the literature reports the morbidity following thyroidectomy but there are only a few specifically addressing this issue, and the results are generally obtained from a statistical analysis that is not thorough: the rarity of the complication event would need studies performed on large numbers of patients. This chapter will focus on two main issues: analysing, from the results reported in the literature, what is a 'reasonable' incidence rate of complications for any surgeon performing thyroidectomies, and not necessarily operating in a large-volume thyroid surgery department, and briefly examining the most important statistical problems regarding the analysis of a rare event, such as the morbidity after thyroid surgery, when performing a reliable study on complications.