More thyroid cancers were found between 1999 and 2008, but almost all of them were tiny lumps that doctors couldn’t even feel during a regular checkup — so they probably found them by accident while doing scans or tests for other reasons.

More people were diagnosed with thyroid cancer between 1999 and 2008, and most of that increase came from ultrasounds finding tiny, harmless lumps in the thyroid—so it’s not that more people got sick, but that we’re just finding tiny things we wouldn’t have noticed before.

In South Korea, more people were getting their thyroids checked with scans between 1999 and 2008, and as a result, way more thyroid cancers were found—way more than would’ve been found just by doctors noticing symptoms. This suggests the rise in diagnoses is mostly because of all the extra screening, not because more people were actually getting sick.

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.

In South Korea, doctors started finding much smaller thyroid lumps between 1999 and 2008—even though these lumps were too tiny to feel or cause any problems. This suggests they’re being found by accident during scans or tests done for other reasons.

In South Korea, between 1999 and 2008, doctors started finding a lot more tiny thyroid cancers—so many that the overall number jumped more than six times. But almost all of these were very small tumors that probably wouldn’t have caused any harm if left alone.