Surgeons' skills may improve with age, shows US study

The risk of dying after a major surgery decreases if patients are treated by older doctors

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

Medicare patients’ risk of dying in the month after an operation steadily fell as their surgeon’s age increased, 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 told Reuters Health in a telephone interview.

Little is known about how age and