Department of Endocrine Surgery - DKD HELIOS Clinic Wiesbaden

About the Department of Endocrine Surgery at DKD HELIOS Clinic Wiesbaden

The Department of Endocrine Surgery at the DKD HELIOS Clinic Wiesbaden provides the full range of surgical interventions in its field of competence. The department's surgeons specialize in thyroid and parathyroid surgery. The primary focus of the department's doctors is the treatment of functional disorders, as well as benign and malignant tumors of both thyroid gland and parathyroid glands. The specialists perform more than 500 surgical procedures every year, thanks to which they have rich clinical experience and achieve effective treatment outcomes. The department has the status of a Competence Center for Thyroid and Parathyroid Surgery (certificate of the German Society for General and Abdominal Surgery). The operating rooms of the medical facility are equipped with cutting-edge technology, which guarantees patients the highest safety of surgical treatment. Many interventions are performed using sparing minimally invasive techniques, thanks to which patients recover and return to their usual life in the shortest possible time. The department is headed by Dr. med. Thomas Burgstaller.

Due to the fact that the department employs highly qualified surgeons with many years of clinical experience and has state-of-the-art surgical equipment, patients can count on highly effective treatment according to modern surgical standards. The department's operating rooms are equipped with ultrasound devices of the latest generation, surgical binocular loupes, neuromonitoring systems (including for continuous neuromonitoring), devices for intraoperative measurement of parathyroid hormone levels, etc. The equipment guarantees the highest accuracy and safety of surgical interventions on both thyroid and parathyroid glands.

The department's endocrine surgeons often deal with the treatment of patients with benign thyroid disease. One of the most common pathologies is nodular goiter - neoplasms in the thyroid tissue. To treat patients with the early stages of the disease, doctors use monitoring in dynamics and conservative drug treatment. If the pathology progresses, the only effective method for normalizing the patient's condition is often surgery. Prior to the surgical procedure, endocrinologists, together with the department's surgeons, study the results of the patient's diagnostic examinations and decide on the advisability of the surgical procedure and its type. When performing surgery, it is important for the doctors not only to remove the nodular neoplasms, but also not to damage the vocal cords and the recurrent laryngeal nerve that innervates them, which can lead to irreversible changes in the voice. To do this, the surgeons always use neuromonitoring, which allows excluding damage to the recurrent laryngeal nerve and other anatomical structures.

The department's surgeons are especially interested in the treatment of thyroid malignancies. When performing thyroid tumor resection, the doctors use neuromonitoring systems to ensure patient safety. The main feature of operations in the patients with cancer is the need for total removal of the thyroid gland and affected lymph nodes. An additional treatment for thyroid cancer is radioiodine therapy, which is provided in collaboration with the specialists from the Department of Nuclear Medicine. As a rule, the technique is used as adjuvant therapy for the complete destruction of the "residual" thyroid tissue, which can be detected even after a high-quality surgical procedure. In addition, radioiodine therapy helps to destroy regional and distant metastatic tumor foci.

The department's range of services is complemented by parathyroid surgery. Parathyroid diseases are less common than thyroid pathologies in the department's clinical practice. Most of the operations on the parathyroid glands are performed for hormonally active or inactive adenomas. During the intervention, the doctors use intraoperative measurement of parathyroid hormone levels for immediate control of the outcomes of the operation. In collaboration with the Department of Nephrology, endocrine surgeons perform surgery to treat secondary lesions of the parathyroid glands in dialysis patients. In such cases, they usually perform resection of the enlarged parathyroid glands.

The department specializes in the surgical treatment of the following diseases:

• Benign thyroid diseases
  • Nodular goiter
  • Thyroid adenoma (benign tumor)
  • Autoimmune thyroid diseases 
    • Hashimoto's thyroiditis
    • Basedow's disease
• Malignant thyroid diseases
  • Papillary thyroid cancer
  • Follicular thyroid cancer
  • Medullary thyroid cancer
  • Undifferentiated thyroid cancer
  • Metastases from other tumors (for example, renal cell cancer, breast cancer)
• Parathyroid diseases
  • Primary and secondary hyperparathyroidism
• Other endocrine disorders