Weight-Loss Surgery Not Only For Severely Obese
Newswise, 15th April 2009
Not only severely obese patients should be allowed weight-loss surgery. Latest researches show that this kind of operation is helpful to moderately obese to lose more weight.
Until now many clinics accepted performing weight-loss operations on patients with body max index (BMI) with 40 or more. The studies show, though, that patients with BMI of 30 and 40, and diseases such as type 2 diabetes and hypertension will benefit from the weight-loss surgery as it will improve their health issues.
“We see a wide range of patients who consider surgery. The majority are people that attempted medical weight loss for years and decades without success, and they have an intimate understanding of what morbid obesity means to them in their life. They’re looking for a therapy that can give them some help,” said Peter Hallowell, an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Virginia.
The newest review was carried by Jill Colquitt, a senior research fellow at the University of Southampton. Colquitt examined 26 previously published studies that involved 5,766 patients. Six researches compared batriatic surgery outcomes to those who managed lose weight in conventional way. Twenty studies compared different batriatic surgery operations.
Patients with BMI between 30 and 40 who suffered health issues connected with obesity showed greater weight-loss than patients who tried to lose weight only by dieting and exercising. Also health problems improved significantly. Those results were shown two years after the procedure.
In comparison: moderately obese patients lost 87.2% of excess weight after the operation while those who used diet pills, exercising and low-calorie diet only managed to drop 21.8%.
The study says that also type of procedure affected the results. Gastric bypass, in which the stomach is made smaller and which shortens the small intestine, led to more weight-loss than gastric banding. The other procedure consists on using silicone bands that are adjust to make the stomach smaller. The results of gastric bypass and two other procedures called isolated sleeve gastrecomy and banded gastric bypass, were similar.
One of the aims of the research was to update the information about patients younger than 18 years. Unfortunately they were no researches about weight-loss surgery compared to dieting and exercising in this age group.
“The frontline question is, ‘Is surgery better for patients with lower levels of obesity?’ Those are areas of research that are just beginning to come to light,” said Hallowell. “Their findings are very important. In the small number of randomized controlled trials to look at, there’s clear evidence that surgery is better than not having surgery. There are risks to surgery — we don’t want to minimize that to any degree — but the health benefits noted in these studies certainly outweigh the risks for patients who undergo it.”
The review was published in The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration.
