Chinese language - Weight-loss surgery boosts survival rate

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WORLD / Health

Weight-loss surgery boosts survival rate

(AP)
Updated: 2007-08-23 11:10

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.

Herb Olitsky, a 53-year-old business owner from New York City, walks
across Manhattan's 47th Street, Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2007. Olitsky, who
stands 5 feet 8 inches tall and underwent stomach-stapling surgery in
1999 and went from 520 pounds to his current weight of 160, credits his
improved lifestyle to gastric bypass.?[AP]

Researchers in Sweden and the United States separately found that obese
people who underwent drastic surgery had a 30 percent to 40 percent lower
risk of dying seven to 10 years later 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 United States 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
surgery, which reduces the stomach to a small walnut-sized pouch and
bypasses part of the small intestine where digestion occurs.

The Swedish study is the longest look yet at how obesity surgery affects
mortality.

Researchers led by Dr. Lars Sjostrom of Goteborg University compared
4,047 people with a body-mass index over 34 who had one of three types of
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 percent to 25 percent
of their original weight compared to 2 percent in the other group. Of the
2,010 surgery patients, 101 died. There were 129 deaths in the comparison
group of 2,037 people.

In the US study, Ted Adams of the University of Utah led a team that
looked at 7,925 severely obese people in the state who had gastric
bypass. They were matched with similar people who did not have the
operation and who were selected through their driver's license records
listing height and weight.

After an average of seven years' follow-up, 213 people who had surgery
died compared to 321 who did not have the procedure. The study did not
look at weight loss.

Deaths from diabetes in the surgery group were dramatically cut by 92
percent; from cancer by 60 percent and from heart disease by 56 percent.
Surprisingly, the surgery group had a higher risk of death from
accidents, suicides and other causes not related to disease. The
researchers were puzzled by this.

Both studies were done before surgery advances that have led to smaller
incisions and faster recovery time. Experts say future long-term survival
rates from obesity surgery should be even better.

While neither study was the gold standard test, where patients are
randomly given one treatment or another, surgery's dramatic benefits make
it ethically hard to deny patients the operation, said Dr George Bray of
the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University.

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