• Posted January 21, 2025

Stressed-Out Surgeon? That's Good News for Patients!

Check out your surgeon as you’re wheeled into the operating room. Do they seem tense, on edge, or stressed out?

If so, that could be good news for you, a new study says.

The patients of stressed surgeons tend to suffer fewer major complications from surgery, according to findings of new study published in JAMA Surgery.

Like high-level athletes, experienced surgeons appear to work best under pressure, researchers concluded.

The findings show that “stress among experienced surgeons is associated with patient outcomes and may warrant attention from future efforts geared toward improving surgical care,” a research team led by Dr. Jake Awtry, a research fellow with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, concluded.

For the study, researchers monitored nearly 800 surgeries conducted by 38 attending surgeons.

The surgeons' average age was 46, and about 3 out of 5 were either professors or associate professors, the study says. The surgeons wore devices to track their heart rates while they operated.

The surgeries took place between November 2020 and December 2021 at four university hospitals in Lyon, France. They involved 14 surgical departments and seven specialties -- digestive, orthopedic, gynecologic, urologic, cardiac, thoracic and endocrine surgery.

Patients had a 37% lower risk of major complications if their surgeon’s heart rate revealed increased signs of stress at the start of an operation, researchers found.

But stress did not reduce significantly reduce risk of death or of requiring intensive care.

The findings run counter to previous studies linking surgeon stress to longer operations, impaired dexterity and potentially harmful events.

“Although excessive stress or cognitive workload may harm surgical performance, modest amounts of stress may stimulate better performance in individuals with requisite levels of experience and coping abilities,” the researchers concluded.

Elite athletes are able to focus and succeed under pressure, and it appears that good surgeons share that trait, a team led by Steven Yule, chair of behavioral sciences with the University of Edinburgh in the U.K., wrote in an accompanying editorial.

“These findings challenge the traditional view of stress as harmful in high-demand roles, mirroring decades of sports psychology research showing that moderate stress enhances performance,” they wrote.

Given this, they suggested that surgeons might benefit from the sort of pre-game stress management techniques practiced in locker rooms, to help them better focus on the operation before them.

“Applying these performance-enhancing techniques from professional sports to operating rooms has the potential to unlock unprecedented gains in outcomes and foster a resilient surgical culture,” the editorial concluded.

The findings and the editorial were published Jan. 15.

More information

The University of California-Berkeley has more on the performance benefits of stress.

SOURCE: JAMA Surgery, Jan. 15, 2025