The metabolomics and lipidomics window into thyroid cancer research.

CONTEXT: Thyroid carcinoma is the most common endocrine system malignancy with a fast rising incidence in the last decade for unknown reasons. Fine needle aspiration (FNA) biopsy, the gold standard in thyroid cancer (TC) screening has still its own challenges and in some cases needs a proceeding surgery.

OBJECTIVE: This review highlights the role of the two most recent "omics" approaches, "metabolomics" and "lipidomics", in the field of TC research.

METHODS: All the previous studies have been extracted from the literature and major concepts were detailed in the field of TC metabolomics and lipidomics.

RESULTS: Metabolomics and lipidomics, have potential in finding biomarkers related to thyroid carcinoma. Among the previous studies, the most important introduced altered tissue metabolites and lipids included glucose and galactose, lactate, Scyllo- and Myo inositol, hypoxanthine, citrate, cholesterol and choline.

CONCLUSION: Metabolomics methods have been widely used in the field of biomarker discovery in TC and attempts are still in progress to use these methods to find a reliable biomarker panel besides current diagnostic tools.