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 Even more important, they also saw reductions in other medical
problems, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol,
joint diseases and problems breathing while asleep, said Dr. J.
Hunter Mehaffey.
Mehaffey, from the University of Virginia School of Medicine, told
Reuters Health by phone, “It’s not just that people are losing a lot
of weight, but they’re also much healthier.”
In gastric bypass operations, surgeons remove part of the stomach
and reroute the intestines to help patients with extreme obesity
lose weight.
The American Society of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery estimates
that in 2014, 193,000 people in the U.S. underwent weight loss
operations, known collectively as bariatric surgery. The different
procedures include gastric bypass, adjustable gastric banding and
sleeve gastrectomy.
Using a large database, Mehaffey and colleagues identified 1,087
patients who had gastric bypass surgery for morbid obesity between
1985 and 2004.
Ten years later, the authors were able to contact 651 of the
patients by phone.
Most were white and female, in their early 40s, on average. At the
time of the surgery, their average body mass index - a ratio of
weight to height – was in the low to mid 50s. A normal body mass
index (BMI) ranges from 18.5 to 24.9.
(You can calculate yours here, courtesy of the National Institutes
of Health: http://1.usa.gov/1ooHYzU.)
By two years after the operation, patients had lost 74 percent of
their excess BMI, on average. At 10 years, they had still kept off
more than half of the excess BMI that they had lost, and more than
25 percent of their original total body weight loss.
When they had their surgery, 41 percent of the patients had
diabetes, 25 percent had heart disease, 59 percent had high blood
pressure and 36 percent had sleep apnea, the authors reported in
Annals of Surgery.
At the 10-year point, only 18 percent still had diabetes, 16 percent
had heart disease, 47 percent had high blood pressure, and 16
percent had sleep apnea.
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The rate of joint disease had dropped from 61 percent to 32 percent.
And the rate of reflux disease had fallen from 38 percent to 29
percent.
“The benefits are immense,” said Dr. Amir Ghaferi, a bariatric
surgeon at the University of Michigan Health System who was not part
of the study. “There’s proven evidence that this type of surgery has
benefits that exceed intensive medical management like counseling,
dietary assistance and exercise programs.”
But Ghaferi emphasized that the study didn’t represent all the
surgery options currently available.
“Gastric bypass is considered the gold standard, but over the past
five or six years, there have been more sleeve gastrectomy
procedures,” he said.
Still, Ghaferi said, the new findings are useful.
“There’s always a concern about weight regain over time so it’s good
to see 50 percent of excess (BMI) was kept off at 10 years,” he
said.
But he cautioned that weight loss surgery is a tool, not a solution.
“It’s a piece of the puzzle on how to treat and manage obesity, but
you can slip back into your bad habits,” he said. “That’s why
surgery follow up is vital to treatment success.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/28X5Ksx Annals of Surgery, July 2016.
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