Surgeon to the Seniors
 

Stephen Yang says the practice of operating on older patients will grow in coming years.

When it comes to major chest procedures, Stephen Yang stands as king of the hill in Maryland: Over the past five years, he’s done nearly 2,000 cases. But one detail behind those numbers is less visible. By Yang’s own count, 120 of his thoracic surgery patients in the last decade have been older than 80. And whereas nationally the mortality-rate average among patients in this age range falls between 5 percent and 20 percent, the mortality rate among Yang’s cases comes in at 3 percent.

One of Yang’s more memorable cases involved an 85-year-old woman from Pennsylvania who was suffering from lung cancer. Area doctors had told her she wasn’t a good candidate for surgery, but her son, a physician, learned of Yang’s track record. When Yang said her case was a “go,” the patient and her family were pleasantly surprised. And today, three years out, Yang reports that she’s happily alive and cancer-free.

“Lung cancer isn’t a death sentence anymore,” Yang says. When it’s caught early and surgically removed, at least 70 percent of patients can be cured. That promise, he believes, can now be extended to octogenarians. “There’s a big push toward geriatric surgery in general,” he says, fueled in part by major advances in care and a larger aging population. “It’s a field,” he adds, “that should grow quickly over the next few years as aging boomers swell the ranks of senior citizens.”

Yang has a predilection for operating on older patients whom other surgeons might reject as poor candidates. He typically invites hopeful patients to his office for consultation, where he performs what he calls his “eyeball test,” appraising the person’s stamina and condition, looking for a “gut feeling that they’re going to do well.” Key issues that make many surgeons shy away from geriatric procedures, he notes, are age and low lung capacity. Yang’s experience has given him greater reason for optimism. “I’ve always kept an open mind,” he says.