An Analysis Of Life After Weight Loss Surgery

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Health/Nutrition A Look At The Health Risks Following Bariatric Surgery

As obesity continues to rise across much of the Western world we are becoming more and more sensitive to the health risks of being significantly overweight and of the increased risk of death resulting from obesity. But just how far are these risks reduced by undergoing obesity surgery?

A study recently looked at the records of a large number of people who underwent weight loss surgery in the 10 years from the start of 1995 to the end of 2004 and discovered that in the region of one percent of patients died within a year of their surgery and approximately 6 percent died inside 5 years. When these statistics were adjusted to take account of sex and age and matched against figures for the population at large they were discovered to be fairly high. So what exactly does this say about the ability of obesity surgery to lower the general risk to our health?

If we are to answer this question we have to look behind the headline figures and find out why these deaths happened and where the real difference lies between the general population and obesity patients.

If we consider the breakdown of the figures two things in particular stand out.

The first is the figure for patients whose deaths resulted from heart disease which is the leading cause of death in the obesity patients and is considerably above that seen in the general population.

The second is the figure for deaths resulting from suicide and drug overdoses which, although not formally categorized as suicide, must nevertheless raise the question of whether such overdoses were in fact accidental. In the population as a whole you could expect to see some 2 deaths from suicide in a group of the same size as that used in the study and yet this study group showed 16 suicides and 14 deaths from drug overdoses.

If we examine these findings and consider them alongside our wider knowledge of people having obesity surgery then we may perhaps understand this variation at least in part.

Despite the fact that gastric bypass surgery is normally extremely successful it is often not done until people are at risk from other conditions or comorbidities and, though surgery will cure a number of these problems and lower the risks from others, a lot of people are still at some degree of risk following surgery. In a lot of cases for instance people remain troubled by such things as diabetes mellitus and hypertension and it is thus unsurprising that this section of the population has an increased risk of heart disease.

Furthermore, while bariatric surgery can result in a large reduction in weight a lot of people are still very much overweight for a long time following surgery and many people will stay that way for years to come.

Finally, the changes in lifestyle following surgery can be dramatic and a lot of people experience depression during the months following their surgery. Certainly a great deal of attention is given to the physical affects of weight loss surgery and the requirement for such things as a strict diet and an exercise program but, all too frequently, very little attention is paid to the very real psychological affects of surgery.

Only time will reveal whether this explanation stands up but there can be little doubt that improvements to post-operative care for gastric bypass surgery patients would go a long way to solving this variation.

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