Obesity surgery is very much a last resort for a lot of people and something to be put off as long a possible while they explore all of their choices. Indeed, in the majority of cases people are helped in this by their doctor who will often insist on a program of diet and exercise before even considering referring a patient for surgery. But is this the best approach?

Aside from the fact that almost everybody agrees that exercise and diet programs do not work for the vast majority of patients, there is very good evidence to show that delaying surgery is actually putting patient’s lives at risk.

In a recent study the records of over 2,000 patients who underwent gastric bypass surgery between 1995 and 2004 in one particular medical center were examined. The researchers wanted to see if there were any factors which could have been used to predict the risks facing this group of patients before they had surgery and the team of researchers identified 5 things that they felt increased a patient’s risk from surgery.

The first of the five factors was gender with men being at greater risk than women. The second was a body mass index in excess of 50. The third factor was age with patients over 45 years of age being at higher risk. The fourth was the presence of high blood pressure (hypertension), often related to cardiovascular disease. The last factor was previous evidence of pulmonary embolus (a blood clot in the lungs) or a propensity for this condition.

The researchers then awarded one point for the presence of each factor and split the study group into those at low, medium and high risk according to their scores. The then looked at the death rate for each of these three groups and discovered that in the low risk group the death rate was 0.31%, in the medium risk group it was 1.9% and in the high risk group it was 7.56%.

Now there is not much you can do about your gender but, when it comes to the other factors, the effect as far as the complications of weight loss surgery are concerned are clear. Getting older, continuing to put on weight and developing health problems will all increase the risks posed by surgery. Thus, if you are suffering from morbid obesity, you should think about undergoing surgery early and balance the risks of waiting against the chances of finding a successful alternative.

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Tags: death risk, gastric bypass, gastric bypass surgery, obesity surgery, surgical risks, weight loss surgery

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Obesity, Weight Loss Surgery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.