Bariatric Surgery
Bariatric or weight loss surgery is the most effective therapy for morbidly obese people. Weight loss or bariatric surgery is a major surgery. Its growing use to treat morbid obesity is the result of three factors: Our current knowledge of the significant health risks of morbid obesity; the relatively low risk and complications of the procedures versus not having surgery; and the ineffectiveness of current non-surgical approaches to produce sustained weight loss.
Surgery is the only proven consistently effective treatment for morbid obesity. Studies have demonstrated that once the problem of morbid obesity has been reached, efforts such as dieting and exercise programs have a limited ability to provide effective long-term relief. In fact, one percent or less of morbidly obese individuals is able to lose even moderate weight and keep the weight off for even a year. In contrast, the commonly performed weight loss surgeries result in maintenance of average excess body weight loss of 40%- 60% at five years.
A recent study comparing large populations of morbidly obese patients who underwent gastric bypass surgery to morbidly obese patients who did not undergo weight loss surgery showed an eighty-nine percent reduction in mortality risk in the patients who underwent surgery. The patients who did not undergo surgery had a ten-fold higher mortality rate at five years compared to the surgery group. The risk of undergoing surgery is simply far less than the risk of remaining morbidly obese.
The American Society for Bariatric Surgery describes two basic approaches that weight loss surgery takes to achieve change: Restrictive procedures that decrease food intake. Malabsorptive procedures that alter digestion, thus causing the food to be poorly digested and incompletely absorbed so that it is eliminated in the stool
Actually the most popular bariatric procedures are:
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