Surgeons’ skills improve as they grow old

Surgeons’ skills may improve with age, and male and female surgeons perform equally well, a recent U. S. study finds.

Medicare patients’ risk of dying in the month after an operation steadily fell as their surgeon’s age increased, Dr Yusuke Tsugawa of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in Los Angeles and colleagues report in The BMJ.

There was little difference between mortality among patients of male or female doctors, with one exception. “Patients treated by female surgeons in their 50s had the lowest mortality across all groups,” Tsugawa said.

Little is known about how age influence the quality of a surgeon’s work, Tsugawa and his colleagues write. Skills could improve over time through experience, or the surgeon could lose dexterity with aging or have a hard time keeping up with technology.

To investigate, the researchers looked at mortality 30 days after surgery for Medicare beneficiaries.

Among the 892,200 patients treated by 46,000 surgeons, the overall risk of dying within 30 days of a surgery was 6.4 per cent. After adjusting for other factors, mortality rates were 6.6 per cent with surgeons under age 40; 6.5 per cent with surgeons in their 40s; 6.4 per cent with surgeons in their 50s and 6.3 percent for those 60 and older

This doesn't mean people should seek out older surgeons, Tsugawa said.