When your child has thyroid disease, you want to know they will be treated by experts with vast experience in pediatric conditions. The Pediatric Thyroid Center here at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) has been treating patients for more than 15 years. Each year we are the busiest center in the United States with the highest volume for evaluating of all types of thyroid conditions and thyroid-specific procedures.  

Comprehensive multidisciplinary care

We have all the resources your child needs at CHOP. If their treatment path goes beyond endocrinology and includes interventional radiology, surgery, nuclear medicine or oncology, our Pediatric Thyroid Center has internationally recognized experts in each discipline that are available and ready to help.  

Our experienced team

Our center is led by Andrew J. Bauer, MD, an internationally recognized leader in pediatric thyroid disease, and Sogol Mostoufi-Moab, MD, MSCE, a pediatrician trained in both endocrinology and oncology. Together, Drs. Bauer and Mostoufi-Moab have evaluated more than 5,000 children for thyroid disease since the center’s establishment in 2009. They also partner with Theodore W. Laetsch, MD, a pediatric oncologist in our Advanced Pediatric Thyroid Cancer Therapeutics Program with expertise in treating patients with advanced thyroid disease.

We are the busiest and most experienced center of our kind in the United States. Each year our team:

• Evaluates more than 50 new patients with Graves’ disease
• Evaluates more than 200 new patients with thyroid nodules
• Performs fine needle aspiration (FNA) on approximately 50 patients
• Has 70 or more thyroid surgeries performed by our two thyroid surgeons, Scott Adzick, MD, MMM, FACS, FAAP, and Ken Kazahaya, MD, MBA, FACS
• Provides ongoing care for more than 350 patients with thyroid cancer (with three to four new thyroid cancer patients diagnosed each month)
• Performs more than 700 point-of-care ultrasounds (POCUS)

Every day the number of patients we evaluate and treat grows larger. And as thyroid diseases become more complex, we're dedicated to researching and learning everything possible to provide the best care to our patients and families.  

Exceptional diagnostic abilities

We apply a thorough and innovative approach to managing thyroid conditions and are recognized as one of the few pediatric thyroid clinics in the United States capable of performing and interpreting POCUS. We take advantage of our access to POCUS during clinic visits, allowing us to interpret images in real time and review them with our patients and their families. This allows us to make efficient and precise decisions about whether a nodule would benefit from FNA, or if it can be safely monitored. 

Our team uses a special technique called Rapid On-Site Evaluation (ROSE) along with sedation to check thyroid nodules. This means our doctors usually need to take fewer samples and are less likely to have to repeat the test. By combining this with a very accurate pre-surgery evaluation, we can better decide how much of the thyroid to remove. This helps avoid unnecessary surgery for nodules that turn out to be harmless and makes sure patients with thyroid cancer get the right amount of surgery the first time, reducing the need for a second operation.

Why choose CHOP for thyroid surgery

If your child requires thyroid surgery, you will want a pediatric-trained surgeon with extensive experience operating on the thyroid. Experience is critical to achieving the best possible outcome while lowering the risks of complications from surgery. Our surgeons have the expertise to avoid problems like damage to the small pea-shaped glands behind the thyroid (parathyroid glands) and the nerves that control the vocal cords (recurrent laryngeal nerve). 

Thyroid surgery volumes

Most experienced surgical teams at other hospitals will complete 20 to 30 pediatric thyroid surgeries per year. Here at CHOP, our surgeons have performed more than 70 thyroid surgeries each year for the past 15 years.

The large number of pediatric thyroid patients we evaluate and care for means our specialists have developed a unique set of skills that allow them to:

• Look for things that might increase your child’s risk of thyroid problems
• Carefully review ultrasound images of the thyroid
• Decide if FNA testing would be helpful
• Create a treatment plan just for your child, which may include medicine, surgery or both, based on their medical history, physical exam and test results
• Make sure radioactive iodine scans, and in some cases oral chemotherapy, are used only when they’re truly needed

When we say our specialists have “written the book” on treating thyroid nodules and thyroid cancer in children, we mean it. Our experts have written over 150 research papers and more than 50 book chapters on caring for kids with thyroid disease, helped create multiple international care guidelines, and they travel around the world to teach other doctors about pediatric thyroid care.