Management of the solitary cold thyroid nodule. A prospective study.

Forty-six patients with single cold thyroid nodules (SCTN) were studied prospectively to evaluate radio-iodine scans and fine needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) as outpatient and preoperative diagnostic modalities and frozen section (FS) and paraffin section (PS) as excisional biopsies. In our series FNAB has a reasonable sensitivity (75%), good specificity (87%), a low positive predictive value of 38% and a high negative value of 97%. It has a false negative rate of 2.3% and a false positive rate of 56%.