The one-year Comprehensive Endocrine Surgery Fellowship at Mayo Clinic's campus in Rochester, Minnesota, is a surgical specialty fellowship designated for those who wish to apply an integrated multidisciplinary approach in caring for people with common and complicated endocrine diseases and disorders requiring surgery.

As a trainee in this program, you evaluate people with endocrine disorders while developing and demonstrating operative expertise and proficiency in the preoperative considerations, perioperative management, surgical controversies, follow-up, and prognosis.

Your learning experiences include:

Parathyroid

• Hyperparathyroidism
• "Missing" parathyroid adenoma; thymectomy
• Re-operative parathyroid procedures
• Autotransplantation
• Intraoperative parathyroid hormone (PTH) monitoring
• Mediastinal explorations and alternatives
• Surgical techniques for parathyroid carcinoma, hypercalcemic crisis

Thyroid

• Fine needle aspirations
• Partial, subtotal, near-total, and total lobectomy and thyroidectomy
• Modified radical neck dissection
• Thyroglossal duct operations
• Substernal goiter
• Graves' disease, toxic adenoma, and toxic multinodular goiter
• Thyroid storm
• Metastatic thyroid carcinomas; ultrasound (US)-directed alcohol ablation

Adrenal gland

• Open anterior, posterior, and laparoscopic adrenalectomy
• Cushing's adrenal adenoma and carcinoma; bilateral hyperplasia
• Primary aldosteronism
• Pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma
• "Incidentaloma"
• Adrenocortical carcinoma

Pancreas

• Insulinoma and noninsulinoma pancreatogenous hypoglycemia syndrome (NIPHS)
• Gastrinoma (Zollinger-Ellison syndrome)
• Nonfunctional islet cell tumors and carcinomas
• Rare hormonally active islet cell tumors

Carcinoid

• Intraoperative pharmacological management
• Resection strategies — primary tumor, lymph node metastases, distant disease
• Nonresectional therapy

Multiple endocrine neoplasia (MEN) syndromes

• MEN-1, MEN-2A and B, familial medullary thyroid cancer (FMTC)
• Von Hippel-Lindau disease (vHL), paraganglioma syndromes

You also gain experience in clinical endocrinology, radiology (imaging and localization), pathology and cytology, and surgical education and innovations.

The fellowship requires a clinical research component.

Program history

The Comprehensive Endocrine Surgery Fellowship at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, was established in 2006 and accepted the first fellow to the program in 2007. We anticipate that one trainee will complete this program annually.