Experience matters for prostate cancer surgery

In this study, experience was measured not by age or years as a surgeon but by the number of times doctors performed this operation.
“Advice for patients is to try to seek out experienced surgeons, and they’re likely to be ones who specialize in the procedure,” Andrew Vickers of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.
The researchers followed 7,765 prostate cancer patients who underwent an operation called radical prostatectomy performed by 72 surgeons at four U.S. academic medical centers in New York, Texas, Michigan and Ohio from 1987 to 2003.
As the number of times a doctor performed it increased, the number of patients who remained cancer-free five years after the surgery also rose, the researchers wrote in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
But at a certain point the improvement in surgical outcome topped out and stabilized regardless of how many more times a surgeon did the procedure.
“The learning curve for prostate cancer recurrence after radical prostatectomy was steep and did not start to plateau until a surgeon had completed approximately 250 prior operations,” the researchers wrote.