In South Korea, more people were diagnosed with thyroid cancer between 1999 and 2012, but the number of people dying from it didn’t go up — which suggests doctors are just finding harmless lumps that wouldn’t have hurt anyone, not more dangerous cancers.

In South Korea, doctors found way more cases of thyroid cancer between 1999 and 2008, but surprisingly, not more people died from it. This suggests they’re just finding harmless lumps that wouldn’t have hurt anyone, not more deadly cancers.

In South Korea, doctors started finding a lot more cases of thyroid cancer between 1993 and 2011—15 times more—but surprisingly, the number of people dying from it didn’t go up at all.

In South Korea, most of the rise in thyroid cancer diagnoses between 1999 and 2008 was from tiny tumors that almost never kill people — doctors were just finding them more often, not because more people were getting deadly cancer.

In South Korea, more people are being told they have thyroid cancer than before, but not fewer people are dying from it — which means many of those new diagnoses might be for cancers that wouldn’t have hurt them anyway.

In South Korea, more people were diagnosed with tiny thyroid lumps between 1999 and 2008—not because more people got sick, but because doctors started scanning for them more often with fancy tests.