Larry Moss, MD, FACS
Professor and Chief Surgeon-in-Chief, Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital

Mentee:

Smita Sampath

Dr. Moss’s research interests include necrotizing enterocolitis; evidencebased surgery, clinical trials, database development, analysis of nonrandomized data in surgery; whereas his clinical interests encompass thoracic, laparascopic children’s surgery, neonatal surgery, separation of conjoined twins, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. He was the first surgeon to pioneer evidence based surgery, which arose from a longstanding debate about the relative merits of two treatments options for perforating necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), an inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract that affects one in 20 premature babies. Dr. Moss and his colleagues discovered that after reviewing 80,000 studies in pediatric surgery, published between 1966 and 1999, only 134 were randomized controlled trials. As reported in 2001 in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery, only 16 of these trials compared two procedures, and most were poorly designed. While still at Stanford, Dr. Moss launched a 15-center study comparing the two treatment options. The May 25, 2006 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reported the results: the two procedures have virtually the same survival rate, about 65 percent. As the first randomized and controlled multi-center trial comparing pediatric surgical procedures, the new study established the more fundamental point that surgeons like other physicians, can and should test their strategies in clinical trials.