Carotid body tumor excisions: adverse outcomes of adding carotid endarterectomy.

Background: Carotid body tumors (CBT) are rare, infrequently malignant vascular neoplasms that are near the carotid bifurcation. Surgical excision is the treatment of choice, but individual surgeons or an institution cannot accumulate sufficient expertise to evaluate their outcomes with confidence. Our purpose was to report outcomes of surgical procedures for CBT from a nationwide dataset.

Local and national trends over a decade in the surgical treatment of ductal carcinoma in situ.

Background: Ductal cancer in situ (DCIS) is an increasingly frequent diagnosis in breast cancer, and management continues to challenge surgeons and oncologists. The purpose of our study was to examine local and national rates of breast conservation surgery and breast reconstruction surgery and to explore patient and surgeon factors associated with the procedures.

Methods: Review of the 1,342 patients in our institutional breast cancer database yielded 211 patients with DCIS.

Prognostic indices in breast cancer are related to race.

African-American (AA) women have a higher mortality from breast cancer than Caucasians (C). This may be attributed to stage of disease at presentation, but specific prognostic factors are not well identified. We sought to identify prognostic factors in our database of early-stage (stage I and II) breast cancer from 1990 to 1999.

National estimates of mortality rates for radical pancreaticoduodenectomy in 25,000 patients.

Background: Recent publications suggest an inverse relationship between mortality rates in the Whipple procedure for periampullary cancer and hospital volume/teaching status.

Methods: The Nationwide Inpatient Sample database from 1988 to 1995, containing 24926 patients undergoing pancreatectomy for periampullary cancer, was used.

Results: The mean number of procedures per hospital per year was 1.