Previous research has shown a surgeon's level of experience can be important in influencing an operation's success. In this study, experience was measured not by age or years as a surgeon but by the number of times doctors performed this operation.

"Advice for patients is to try to seek out experienced surgeons, and they're likely to be ones who specialize in the procedure," Andrew Vickers of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview. ...

As the number of times a doctor performed it increased, the number of patients who remained cancer-free five years after the surgery also rose, the researchers wrote in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

But at a certain point the improvement in surgical outcome topped out and stabilized regardless of how many more times a surgeon did the procedure.