Unneeded Surgeries Assailed : Medicine: Research done at a San Diego hospital finds that unnecessary hysterectomies are being performed on women with benign tumors.

Doctors should stop performing routine hysterectomies on women who have benign uterine tumors but are not suffering pain or other symptoms, scientists said Wednesday in a new study based on surgeries performed at a San Diego hospital.

The research bolsters previous evidence that many hysterectomies--operations to remove the uterus--are performed unnecessarily.

About 650,000 hysterectomies are performed each year in the United States. About 175,000 are performed on women who have benign fibroid tumors, which are non-cancerous growths in the uterus.

The findings suggest that about 30,000 of those women had no symptoms, so their hysterectomies were unjustified.

Up to half of fibroid tumors produce symptoms such as pelvic pain and pressure, excessive uterine bleeding, recurrent miscarriages and infertility. Many hysterectomies are performed to alleviate such symptoms, and the study didn’t challenge that practice.

The study, published in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, was conducted by Dr. Joseph C. Gambone of UCLA and Drs. Robert C. Reiter and Philip L. Wagner of the University of Iowa.

It involved 93 women with benign fibroid tumors who underwent hysterectomies at San Diego Naval Hospital between January, 1986, and January, 1989.

The researchers wrote that an unknown but substantial portion of hysterectomies are performed on women whose fibroid tumors have grown to a certain size but who don’t suffer any symptoms. The American College of Gynecology recommends hysterectomies when the tumors make the uterus as big as it would be during the 12th week of pregnancy.

Doctors often justify hysterectomies on such women because they believe the risk of complications during the operation will increase if the surgery is delayed until the benign tumors and uterus become even bigger.

But Gambone and his colleagues found the rate of blood loss, infection and other surgical complications was virtually the same--about 28%--during hysterectomies on women with smaller tumors and those with larger tumors.

That means doctors should not routinely recommend hysterectomy for symptom-free women with large fibroid tumors, they concluded.