JMSCR Vol||09||Issue||08||Page 61-67||August

Introduction The burden of thyroid disease in general population is enormous. As many as 50% in the community have microscopic nodules whereas palpable nodules are encountered in 4% of the population between the age of 30-60 years. The vast majority of thyroid nodules are nonneoplastic or benign neoplasm. The distinction between these benign neoplasms cannot be based reliably on clinical presentation only. Several diagnostic tests; such as radionuclide scanning, high resolution USG, FNAC, biopsy & immunomarkers have been used for correct evaluation. Although current diagnostic ”gold standard” for most thyroid lesions is histopathological evaluation using routine H&E stain, by expert pathologists, yet the diagnostic agreement remains controversial. One of the challenging area in surgical pathology is differential diagnosis of encapsulated follicular tumors with less than typical nuclei and equivocal signs of invasiveness. This necessitates the discrimination between dominant nodule of nodular hyperplasia, follicular adenoma, minimally invasive follicular carcinoma and follicular variant of papillary carcinoma. Recent studies pointed to some IHC markers in different thyroid diseases in terms of diagnostic & prognostic utility where no vascular or capsular invasion can be observed but a transformation at molecular level can be considered. Galectin-3 represents the well-studied molecular candidate for this purpose. This marker has been identified in both cytoplasmic and nuclear compartment & has been implicated in cellular proliferation, apoptosis as well as malignant transformation and metastasis of cancer cells.