5 Reasons For Not Delaying Obesity Surgery

For a lot of people gastric bypass surgery is very much a last resort and something to be put off as long a possible while they consider all of their options. In actual fact, in most cases people are assisted in this by their doctor who will normally insist on an extended program of diet and exercise before referring a patient for surgery. But is this the correct approach?

Apart from the fact that almost everybody agrees that diet and exercise programs do not work and are a total waste of time for the vast majority of patients, there is very good evidence to suggest that putting off surgery is putting patients at risk.

In a recent study the medical records of more than 2,000 people who had obesity surgery between 1995 and 2004 in one particular medical center were studies. The team carrying out the study wanted to see if there were any factors which could have been used to predict the risks faced by these patients before they underwent surgery and the team of researchers identified 5 things that they felt increased a patient's risk of surgery.

The factor was gender with women being at lower risk than men. The second factor was a body mass index of more than 50. The third factor was age with patients under 45 years of age being at lower risk. The fourth factor was the presence of high blood pressure (hypertension), frequently related to cardiovascular disease. The last factor was previous evidence of a blood clot in the lungs (pulmonary embolus) or a proclivity for this condition.

The researchers went on to award a 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 examined 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 risks of obesity surgery are concerned are obvious. Getting older, continuing to put on weight and developing health problems all raise the risks posed by surgery. So, if you are morbidly obese, then perhaps you ought to consider early surgery and balance the risks involved in waiting against the possibility of finding a successful alternative.