Gender, training influence quality of cancer care

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A surgeon's education, gender or medical training may play a role in whether a woman gets radiation after breast cancer surgery, which is seen as a standard of quality, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

Prior studies have shown that a patient's race, age, income, and other factors affect whether she receives routine radiation after surgery to remove a lump in her breast.

"We have fantastic treatments but we know a substantial number of patients do not initiate them," Dr. Dawn Hershman of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University in New York, said in a telephone interview.

"We haven't really turned the tables on ourselves to see if our own characteristics might be affecting this," said Hershman, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Cancer Institute.

Hershman's team looked at data on nearly 30,000 women aged 65 and older diagnosed with breast cancer between 1991 and 2002 who had surgery in which a lump was removed.

The researchers collected data on the 4,453 surgeons who did the operations -- including gender, medical school location, number of surgical procedures they perform and type of medical degree.

About 75 percent of the women received radiation after surgery. Older women, black women, single women and those who lived outside urban areas were less likely to undergo radiation, which has been shown to help prevent cancer from coming back.

DIFFERENCE 'SMALL BUT SIGNIFICANT'