For elective AAA repair, and even more so for ruptured AAA repair, high-volume surgeons with subspecialty training conferred a significant survival benefit for patients. Although this would seem to argue in favor of regionalization, decisions should await a more complete understanding of the relationship between transfer time, delay in treatment, and outcome.

These data suggest that adoption of the recommendations of the symptomatic carotid endarterectomy trials is appropriate. However, endarterectomy for asymptomatic lesions remains of uncertain benefit on a regional basis and must be individualized to the experience of the specific surgeon. The surgeon volume/outcome relationship that is identified in this study suggests a need for a minimum volume threshold for this procedure.

The analysis of all currently available randomized controlled trials clearly supports the use of surgical thrombectomy for the treatment of thrombosed prosthetic vascular access grafts. The use of endovascular techniques has been found to be inferior to surgery in terms of both primary patency and technical failure rates.

, and diabetes (OR, 1.28; 95% CI, 1.01 to 1.63) were significant independent predictors for 30-day death or stroke. These 5 factors were combined into a simple risk score that can be used to stratify patients into different risk groups for complications after surgery. Conclusions-Several patient characteristics predict the development of stroke and death after carotid endarterectomy.These characteristics may help clinicians in patient counseling and contribute to studies "benchmarking" the outcomes of carotid surgery in the community setting.