Beautiful Virgin Islands

Thursday, Sep 18, 2025

Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if their emergency surgery takes place on the surgeon's birthday

Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if their emergency surgery takes place on the surgeon's birthday

New study finds elderly patients whose emergency surgery took place on the surgeon's birthday were 23% more likely to die within a month.

A new study has found that elderly patients who underwent emergency surgery on their surgeon’s birthday had significantly higher 30-day mortality rates than patients whose surgery took place on any other day of the year.

The 30-day mortality rate (defined as death within 30 days after surgery) for the “surgeon’s birthday” group was 6.9%. This was 23% higher than the 5.6% rate for the “other day” group.

The study, which appears today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), looked at 980,876 procedures performed in US hospitals by 47,489 surgeons. Of those procedures, 2,064 (0.2%) took place on a surgeon’s birthday. The patients were all Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 to 99. They had all undergone one of 17 common emergency surgical procedures between 2011 and 2014.

Distractions during the most common emergency surgery types


Examples of those 17 procedures included cardiovascular surgeries, hip and femur fracture, appendectomy, and small bowel resection. The study focused on emergency surgery, so as to minimize the potential selection bias. For example, surgeons might otherwise choose patients based on their illness severity, or patients might choose their surgeon.

As the authors write, “The effect size of surgeons’ birthday observed in our analysis (1.3 percentage point increase or a 23% increase in mortality), though substantial, is comparable to the impact of other events, including holidays (e.g., Christmas and New Year) and weekends.”

In fact, the history of surgery has often demonstrated that external factors can influence surgical outcomes. The authors refer to a 2014 study showing that patients admitted to Scottish emergency rooms on public holidays had a 27% increase in 30-day mortality. Other research has found, for example, that doctors are more likely to prescribe antibiotics and opioids — and less likely to order cancer screening tests — as the workday progresses. This is most likely because the “cumulative cognitive demand” of such decisions gradually takes its toll.

Research on judges has yielded similar results. It has found, for example, that external factors as diverse as outdoor temperatures and sports results can influence judges’ decisions.

A natural experiment: ER surgery on the doctor’s birthday


But the authors say the “natural experiment” in the present study is more revealing than, for example, holiday-related mortality rates. That is because “those events not only affect physicians’ performance but also influence patients’ decision to seek care (i.e., patients seeking care on these special days might be sicker than those seeking care on other days), as well as hospital staffing.” Unless, of course, the patients know their surgeon’s birthday, which is unlikely (though that may change if this study becomes widely known).

The 1.3% effect size was the result after a very through series of controls. These included, for example, excluding those surgeons with the highest patient mortality rates. Other controls included assigning a random “pseudo-birthday” to surgeons to see whether the results still held up, or checking whether the surgeon did an above-average number of procedures on their birthday.

Likewise, the researchers controlled for “milestone” birthdays (such as 40 or 50), and whether a birthday fell on a Friday (which might make after-work birthday festivities more likely). Their findings also held up when the analysis was restricted to procedures with the highest average mortality, or to only the most ill patients. In fact, without these adjustments, the 30-day mortality rate difference between the birthday and non-birthday groups (the unadjusted rate) was even higher (7.0% vs. 5.6%, or a 1.4% difference).

Why does emergency surgery suffer on surgeon’s birthday?


The authors propose a few potential explanations for this “birthday effect.”

These include hurrying through an emergency surgery to be on time for after-work birthday events; distracting birthday-related phone calls or text messages; more conversations with well-wishing staff members; and a decreased likelihood to go back to the hospital that evening if a patient’s condition deteriorates.

They also found that some surgeons did not work on their birthdays. The surgeons in this study performed 2,144 procedures one day before their birthday, and 2,027 one day after their birthday. But they only 1,805 surgeons procedures on their birthday itself. This does not affect the results of the study’s analyses. But it does suggest “that birthdays are an important enough factor for some surgeons to choose not to operate on that day, which supports the credibility of our assumption that a birthday could be a distracting factor for those surgeons who choose to operate on that day,” the authors write.

Limitations and future directions


The researchers emphasized that this study focused on common procedures, and on older Medicare patients. This means that the findings may not apply to other types of patients, or to other surgical procedures.

Still, the authors write, these results may lead to “additional support for surgeons who have potentially distracting events,” such as birthdays, “to make sure that patients receive high quality surgical care regardless of when undergo surgery.”

Newsletter

Related Articles

Beautiful Virgin Islands
0:00
0:00
Close
New OpenAI Study Finds Majority of ChatGPT Use Is Personal, Not Professional
Hong Kong Industry Group Calls for HK$20 Billion Support Fund to Ease Property Market Stress
Joe Biden’s Post-Presidency Speaking Fees Face Weak Demand amid Corporate Reluctance
Charlie Kirk's murder will break the left's hateful cancel tactics
Kash Patel erupts at ‘buffoon’ Sen. Adam Schiff over Russiagate: ‘You are the biggest fraud’
Homeland Security says Emmy speech ‘fanning the flames of hatred’ after Einbinder’s ‘F— ICE’ remark
Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Assassin Tyler Robinson Faces Death Penalty as Charges Formally Announced
Actor, director, environmentalist Robert Redford dies at 89
The conservative right spreads westward: a huge achievement for 'Alternative for Germany' in local elections
JD Vance Says There Is “No Unity” with Those Who Celebrate Charlie Kirk’s Killing, and he is right!
Trump sues the 'New York Times' for an astronomical sum of 15 billion dollars
Florida Hospital Welcomes Its Largest-Ever Baby: Annan, Nearly Fourteen Pounds at Birth
U.S. and Britain Poised to Finalize Over $10 Billion in High-Tech, Nuclear and Defense Deals During Trump State Visit
China Finds Nvidia Violated Antitrust Laws in Mellanox Deal, Deepens Trade Tensions with US
US Air Force Begins Modifications on Qatar-Donated Jet Amid Plans to Use It as Air Force One
Pope Leo Warns of Societal Crisis Over Mega-CEO Pay, Citing Tesla’s Proposed Trillion-Dollar Package
Poland Green-Lights NATO Deployment in Response to Major Russian Drone Incursion
Elon Musk Retakes Lead as World’s Richest After Brief Ellison Surge
U.S. and China Agree on Framework to Shift TikTok to American Ownership
London Daily Podcast: London Massive Pro Democracy Rally, Musk Support, UK Economic Data and Premier League Results Mark Eventful Weekend
This Week in AI: Meta’s Superintelligence Push, xAI’s Ten Billion-Dollar Raise, Genesis AI’s Robotics Ambitions, Microsoft Restructuring, Amazon’s Million-Robot Milestone, and Google’s AlphaGenome Update
Le Pen Tightens the Pressure on Macron as France Edges Toward Political Breakdown
Musk calls for new UK government at huge pro-democracy rally in London, but Britons have been brainwashed to obey instead of fighting for their human rights
Elon Musk responds to post calling for the murder of Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk: 'Either we fight back or they will kill us'
Czech Republic signs €1.34 billion contract for Leopard 2A8 main battle tanks with delivery from 2028
USA: Office Depot Employees Refused to Print Poster in Memory of Charlie Kirk – and Were Fired
Proposed U.S. Bill Would Allow Civil Suits Against Judges Who Release Repeat Violent Offenders
Penske Media Sues Google Over “AI Overviews,” Claiming It Uses Journalism Without Consent and Destroys Traffic
Indian Student Engineers Propose “Project REBIRTH” to Protect Aircraft from Crashes Using AI, Airbags and Smart Materials
French Debt Downgrade Piles Pressure on Macron’s New Prime Minister
US and UK Near Tech, Nuclear and Whisky Deals Ahead of Trump Trip
One in Three Europeans Now Uses TikTok, According to the Chinese Tech Giant
Could AI Nursing Robots Help Healthcare Staffing Shortages?
NATO Deploys ‘Eastern Sentry’ After Russian Drones Violate Polish Airspace
Anesthesiologist Left Operation Mid-Surgery to Have Sex with Nurse
Tens of Thousands of Young Chinese Get Up Every Morning and Go to Work Where They Do Nothing
The New Life of Novak Djokovic
The German Owner of Politico Mathias Döpfner Eyes Further U.S. Media Expansion After Axel Springer Restructuring
Suspect Arrested: Utah Man in Custody for Charlie Kirk’s Fatal Shooting
In a politically motivated trial: Bolsonaro Sentenced to 27 Years for Plotting Coup After 2022 Defeat
German police raid AfD lawmaker’s offices in inquiry over Chinese payments
Turkish authorities seize leading broadcaster amid fraud and tax investigation
Volkswagen launches aggressive strategy to fend off Chinese challenge in Europe’s EV market
ChatGPT CEO signals policy to alert authorities over suicidal youth after teen’s death
The British legal mafia hit back: Banksy mural of judge beating protester is scrubbed from London court
Surpassing Musk: Larry Ellison becomes the richest man in the world
Embarrassment for Starmer: He fired the ambassador photographed on Epstein’s 'pedophile island'
Manhunt after 'skilled sniper' shot Charlie Kirk. Footage: Suspect running on rooftop during panic
Effective Protest Results: Nepal’s Prime Minister Resigns as Youth-Led Unrest Shakes the Nation
Qatari prime minister says Netanyahu ‘killed any hope’ for Israeli hostages
×