Success rates for prostrate cancer improve dramatically following a surgeons first 250 operations, according to the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Patients treated by inexperienced surgeons (those with only 10 prior operations) were nearly 70% more likely to have evidence of recurrence of their prostate cancer within five years than those whose surgeons who had performed 250 operations. Increasing experience after 250 procedures had little further influence on cancer recurrence.

The study analysed data from 72 surgeons and 7,765 patients along with the number of procedures each had performed before the operation. The idea that more experienced surgeons perform more successfully is widely held but little data had been previously shown to support this.

“Although the successful practice of surgery necessarily presumes a lifetime of learning, the large number of cases required before the learning curve plateaus suggests the need to expand opportunities for training in surgical technique for surgeons in the early years of training,” say the authors.

jnci.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/djm060v1

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