Sleeve gastrectomy more safer than gastric bypass and other weight-loss surgeries: Study

A latest study by the University of Michigan revealed that sleeve gastrectomy is far safer than gastric bypass and other frequent weight-loss surgeries. The findings, published in the journal JAMA Surgery, noted that patients who underwent a sleeve gastrectomy, which involves removing a portion of the stomach, had a lower risk of death and complications in future in comparison to those who had their stomach divided into pouches through gastric bypass surgery. However, gastric bypass outperformed sleeve gastrectomy in one area: sleeve gastrectomy patients were more likely to require follow-up surgery, suggesting that gastric bypass is more successful in the long term, despite the higher risks, revealed the findings. 

Dr Ryan Howard, the lead author of the study, stated that it's critical for patients to understand the risks of serious concerns including death, complications, and hospitalisation following these two surgeries since they help in deciding which type of bariatric surgery to opt for. "You could envision a scenario where a patient is averse to that risk, and so even if a sleeve gastrectomy doesn't confer as much weight loss, they may still want it because it's the safer surgery," he stated in the study. Short-term studies have demonstrated that sleeve gastrectomy is the safer option, but this is the largest study to compare the results of the two operations over a longer period of time, Dr Howard claimed. 

Weight loss helps in mitigating obesity-related heart disease 

Meanwhile, recently a different study found that major weight loss may be able to reverse the majority of the cardiovascular problems associated with obesity. The cross-sectional study of the adult population in the United States was presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) Annual Meeting in the last week of September. According to the findings, the risk of high blood pressure and dyslipidemia was identical in Americans who had previously been overweight, but later lost weight and those who had always maintained a healthy weight.

The findings noted that while weight loss reduced the risk of current type 2 diabetes, it remained higher among persons who had previously been overweight compared to those who never had obesity. Moreover, 40% of adults in the US are overweight (BMI higher than 30 kg/m2), with nearly one in ten classified as having huge obesity, found the study nothing that almost all cardiovascular risk factors are directly related to body weight. They compared the prevalence of high blood pressure, dyslipidemia, and type 2 diabetes between the groups using data from a series of cross-sections gathered biennially by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 1999 to 2013. 

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