Rod Stewart, Thyroid Cancer, and a Singer's Voice

What he told Diane Sawyer

Rod Stewart spoke about his thyroid cancer diagnosis in an interview with Diane Sawyer that ABC News aired on February 7, 2001.

"It was a terrible shock," he told her. "I mean, I just went into total silence for a few days."

AARP reported in 2025 that a routine scan in 2000, when he was 55, found a cancerous tumor on his thyroid gland, and that he needed surgery. Afterward he had to relearn how to sing. "First I could sing one line of 'Maggie May.' Then two lines. It was scary," he told AARP. It took nine months of rehab before his voice returned.

AARP also reported that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2016 and was declared cancer-free in 2019. Nothing else about his treatment is claimed here. What follows is about the disease, and about why an operation on this particular gland matters so much to anyone who uses their voice.

A small gland in a crowded place

NCI describes the thyroid as a butterfly-shaped gland at the base of the throat, near the windpipe. Its hormones help control heart rate, body temperature, and metabolism, the rate at which food is turned into energy.

It sits in crowded company. Four pea-sized parathyroid glands lie near it. The voice box is just above it, and NCI's staging system lists the nerve that controls the vocal cords, the recurrent laryngeal nerve, among the nearby structures a thyroid tumor can reach. That is why NCI lists laryngoscopy, a look at the voice box to see whether the vocal cords move normally, among the tests used in diagnosis.

Four cancers, one gland

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) names four main types.

Papillary and follicular cancers are called well-differentiated. They are the large majority and are highly treatable. Medullary thyroid cancer sits in the middle for outcomes and is sometimes inherited. Anaplastic thyroid cancer is aggressive and carries a poor prognosis.

Risk factors NCI lists include radiation exposure in childhood, family history of thyroid disease, MEN syndrome, RET gene variants, female sex, and Asian race. On radiation, NCI notes the long tail: thyroid cancers "appear as early as 5 years after radiation therapy and may appear 20 or more years later."

How a lump gets sorted out

Most thyroid cancer starts as a nodule you or a clinician can feel. Most nodules are not cancer. A cold nodule is one that does not take up iodine on a scan. NCI puts the overall rate of cancer in a cold nodule at 12% to 15%, and higher in people under 40.

NCI lists the tests used: a physical exam, laryngoscopy, blood hormone studies, ultrasound, a CT scan, and a fine-needle aspiration biopsy, which draws cells through a thin needle. In medullary thyroid cancer the cancer cells come from C cells, which make a hormone called calcitonin.

Get your neck checked if you notice any of these

NCI says to check with your doctor if you have any of the following:

• A lump (nodule) in the neck
• Trouble breathing
• Trouble swallowing
• Pain when swallowing
• Hoarseness

Other conditions can cause the same signs. Mention any radiation treatment to the head or neck in childhood, even decades ago, because NCI lists it as a risk factor.

If you have serious trouble breathing, call 911 or go to an emergency room.

The operation, and what is genuinely at risk

NCI lists two main operations: lobectomy, which removes one lobe of the thyroid, and total thyroidectomy, which removes the whole gland. NCI says the aim of surgery is to remove the tumor completely while limiting harm.

Because the gland sits so close to the voice box and the parathyroid glands, ask your surgical team what the risks are for you. If your voice is part of your work, say so before surgery. It is a reasonable thing to raise.

Afterward

NCI notes that after thyroid surgery, everyone except people who had only a lobectomy needs thyroid hormone replacement.

For some differentiated cancers, radioactive iodine follows surgery. The thyroid uses iodine to make its hormones, which is why radioactive iodine can be used to treat it. NCI also notes that TSH suppression, meaning keeping the pituitary hormone low with medication, is part of treatment for differentiated disease, and that rising thyroglobulin in the blood signals recurrence.

The numbers, and the honest caveat

Thyroid cancer has among the best outcomes in oncology. SEER, NCI's cancer surveillance program, puts five-year relative survival at 98.3% for people diagnosed between 2016 and 2022. By stage it runs 99.9% for localized disease, 98.1% for regional disease, and 48.3% for distant disease. Localized cases make up 63% of the total, regional 31%, and distant only 3%.

The American Cancer Society projects about 45,240 new cases against 2,320 deaths for 2026, a ratio unlike almost any other cancer. The death rate is 0.5 per 100,000 people.

There is a caveat in that data. SEER's rate of new cases more than doubled between the mid-1970s and the mid-2000s while the death rate stayed close to 0.5 per 100,000 throughout. NCI notes that diagnoses rose from 1974 to 2013 while deaths stayed the same or fell slightly, and it warns that testing can find thyroid cancers that would never have caused symptoms, which it calls overdiagnosis.

NCI adds that age is the single most important prognostic factor, reporting 20-year survival of 98% in low-risk disease and 50% in high-risk disease. Those are group figures. They describe cohorts, not individuals.

Sources

• https://www.cancer.gov/types/thyroid/hp/thyroid-treatment-pdq
• https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/thyro.html
• https://www.cancer.gov/types/thyroid/patient/thyroid-treatment-pdq
• https://www.cancer.gov/types/thyroid/patient/thyroid-screening-pdq
• https://www.aarp.org/entertainment/music/rod-stewart-still-sexy-at-80/
• https://abcnews.go.com/Health/video/feb-2001-rod-stewart-opens-diane-sawyer-thyroid-58568116