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Medicine› Obstetrics and Gynecology› Endometrial and Cervical Cancer Treatments

Gynecologic cancer — Treatment at high-volume or teaching hospitals

Submitted 2026-10-22

Field: Medicine › Obstetrics and GynecologyType: No effect foundArea: gynecologic cancerArea: health services researchTarget: Treatment at high-volume or teaching hospitalsStage: full study

Hypothesis

Patients with gynecologic cancers treated at high-volume or teaching hospitals would survive longer, supporting regionalisation of care.

What failed

Among 48,981 Florida patients treated 1990–2000, univariate analysis suggested better short-term survival at high-volume centres, but multivariate analysis showed no significant survival benefit for teaching or high-volume facilities for any of the five gynecologic cancers.

Broken assumption

Higher hospital volume or teaching status improves survival in gynecologic cancer.

Why

Patients at high-volume centres were significantly younger; once age, race, stage and treatment were accounted for, the apparent advantage disappeared.

From the published paper: Brookfield et al. PLoS ONE, 2009. ↗CC BY

Research ideas from this failure

Unvetted lead — read the papers

New hypotheses this failure suggests, each with a crucial experiment, a rival explanation of the original result, and the papers it rests on. Written by AI from paper titles and abstracts found on OpenAlex (and Europe PMC, for life and health sciences).

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Links in published research

Where this experiment's genes are known to matter outside its own research area, and the papers behind those links. Sources: Open Targets Platform and Europe PMC.