Radioiodine treatment in Graves' disease: Is there a therapeutic standard?

This review article will come to a positive answer to the question entitled. The good experiences within more than 50 years were able to define commonly accepted standards concerning the following items: therapeutic aim, indications, contraindications, pretreatment, dose concept, assessment of radioactivity, follow-up. The broad consensus among experts when to apply medical treatment, surgery or radioiodine in this special disease was one of the reasons that the nuclear medicine treatment is accepted more and more. By this, the patients have to wait for many months to become treated on an in-patient basis, as it is mandatory in Germany. In the current health care scenery it is absolutely unrealistic to demand an increasing number of radioiodine beds. Facing this fact the guidelines of applying radioiodine which are extremely restrictive in Germany have to be modified as proposed by the National Commission on Radiation Protection.