It is concluded that the higher circulating levels of insulin cause increased thyroid proliferation. The clinical manifestations are the larger thyroid volume and the formation of nodules. Thus, the thyroid gland appears to be another victim of the insulin resistance syndrome.

We conclude that such a high prevalence of IR would be an important risk factor for developing DTC, as it is well known with some other nonthyroid carcinomas.

We conclude that M produced a significant decrease in the nodular size in patients with IR and small thyroid nodules, whereas the combination of M with L-T₄ was the best treatment in these women.

Population balance equations have been used to model a wide range of processes including polymerization, crystallization, cloud formation, and cell dynamics. Rather than developing new algorithms specific to population balance equations, it is proposed to adapt the high‐resolution finite volume methods developed for compressible gas dynamics, which have been applied to aerodynamics, astrophysics, detonation waves, and related fields where shock waves occur. High‐resolution algorithms are presented for simulating multidimensional population balance equations with nucleation and size‐dependent growth rates. For sharp distributions, these high‐resolution algorithms can achieve improved numerical accuracy with orders‐of‐magnitude lower computational cost than other finite difference and finite volume algorithms. The algorithms are implemented in the ParticleSolver software package, which is applied to batch and continuous processes with one and multiple internal coordinates. © 2004 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 50: 2738–2749, 2004