Surgery, Study | featured news

Since insurers pay more for patients with surgical complications, some hospitals could actually lose money by improving care, researchers said Tuesday.

Hip replacements are slightly more likely to fail in women than in men, according to one of the largest studies of its kind in U.S. patients. The risk of the implants failing is low, but women were 29% more likely than men to need a repeat surgery within the first three years.

For some people with diabetes, surgery may be the best medicine. Two studies have found that weight loss operations worked much better than the standard treatments to control Type 2 diabetes in obese and overweight people. Those who had surgery to staple the stomach and reroute the small intestine were much more likely to have their diabetes go into complete remission, or to need less medicine, than people given the typical regimen of drugs, diet and exercise, the studies found. The surgery also helped many to lower their blood pressure and cholesterol.

A device that doctors had hoped would be a major advance for many stroke patients appears to be doing more harm than good, according to a federally funded study released Wednesday. The “Gateway-Wingspan” system,” which was approved in 2005 in the hopes of protecting thousands of stroke survivors from another, more devastating attack, turned out to cause more strokes and deaths than simply aggressively treating patients with drugs and advice, the study found.

A U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel began a two-day meeting Tuesday on silicone breast implants to consider ways to improve the effectiveness of post-approval safety studies.

Are wealthy women too posh to push? A new British study shows that upper-class women are more likely to get elective C-sections, raising new questions about who get the surgery -- and why.

Many women with early breast cancer do not appear to need removal of their lymph nodes, as is often recommended, according to a federally funded study released Tuesday.

Patients undergoing surgery still risk falling victim to stunning medical mistakes, ranging from an operation on the wrong surgical site to undergoing ...

Appendectomies are the most common emergency general surgical procedure in the USA, but a new study suggests many are unneeded.