Studies show obesity surgery cuts death risk
LOS ANGELES - THE first long-term studies of stomach stapling and other radical obesity treatments show that they not only lead to lasting weight loss but also dramatically improve survival.
The results are expected to lead to more such operations, possibly for less severely obese people too.
Researchers in the United States and Sweden separately found that obese people who underwent surgery had a 30 to 40 per cent lower risk of dying within the next seven to 10 years, compared with those who did not have such operations.
The research, published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, should put to rest uncertainties about the benefits and risks of weight-loss surgery and may cause governments and insurers to rethink who should qualify for the procedure, some doctors said.
'It's going to dispel the notion that bariatric surgery is cosmetic surgery and support the notion that it saves lives,' said Dr Philip Schauer, director of bariatric surgery at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, who had no role in the research.
Obesity surgeries have surged in recent years along with global waistlines.
In the US alone, 177,600 operations were performed last year, according to the American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery. The most common method was gastric bypass, or stomach stapling.
According to last year's estimates, there are nearly 156,000 people in Singapore who are obese or severely obese.
The stapling surgery facility is available in nearly all major hospitals in Singapore, and Alexandra Hospital has performed the most number of such surgeries.
Researchers led by Dr Lars Sjostrom of Goteborg University in Sweden compared 4,047 people with a body-mass index (BMI) over 34 who had undergone obesity surgery or received standard diet advice.
BMI is a standard measure of height and weight and a BMI over 30 is considered obese.
After a decade, those in the surgery group lost 14 to 25 per cent of weight compared to 2 per cent in the other group.