Introduction: Liver transplant (LT) recipients are at high risk for the development of post-transplant malignancies but there are only solitary reports of thyroid carcinomas in the literature.

Materials and Methods: We analysed 408 patients who had LT between January 1990 and December 2012 at Başkent University Hospital retrospectively. We examined clinical and pathological findings including age, gender, immunosupressive regimens, clinical symptoms, radiological findings and thyroid hormone levels of patients who had fine needle aspiration biopsies (FNAB) before and after LT.

Results: Only 7 of 408 (1.71%) LT recepients had FNAB of thyroid ; 4 before, 3 after LT. The mean age of these patients at the time of LT is 52.75±9.46 years. The etiology of LT were: Wilson disease, congenital hepatic fibrosis, primary billiary chirrosis, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and cholangiocellular carcinoma, HBV and HCV related HCC (2 patients) and criptogenic chronic liver failure. All of 4 pretransplant FNAB and 2 of 3 posttransplant FNAB diagnosed as benign and just 1 of 3 postransplant FNAB (0.24% of all LT) diagnosed as malign according to Bethesda classification. This case was underwent to total thyroidectomy and multifocal papillary thyroid carcinoma was noted in the thyroidectomy specimen. On the follow up of this patient , neither reccurence nor metastasis was noted during 10 years.

Conclusions: The incidence of FNAB and carcinoma of thyroid in our transplantation cases are too low. Because of the high incidence of thyroid dysfunction in transplant patients, screening of thyroid function and taking FNAB from these cases should be a part of follow-up. Our results suggest that although frequency of thyroid nodules is increased in transplant patients, prevalance of thyroid cancer is low among liver transplant patients in contrast to renal transplant patients.