Thyroid cancer: ESMO clinical practice guidelines for diagnosis, treatment and follow-up(ESMO: European Society for Medical Oncology)has been published in December 2019, aiming for providing physicians with the best available evidence on particular issues and recommendations for the best care, and providing cost-effective strategies that will minimize the overtreatment risks. In this article, we focused on the differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) without distant metastases to interpret the ESMO guidelines in the following aspects: diagnosis and pathology/molecular biology, risk of persistent or recurrent disease, radioiodine therapy and long-term follow-up, and compared the ESMO guidelines with American Thyroid Association guidelines (2015 American Thyroid Association management guidelines for adult patients with thyroid nodules and differentiated thyroid cancer: the American Thyroid Association Guidelines Task Force on Thyroid Nodules and Differentiated Thyroid Cancer), together with the related consensuses and recent researches, in order to review the progress in radioiodine therapy.