Bariatric Surgery

Medicare on Tuesday approved three types of stomach-shrinking surgery for obese patients who also have other serious health problems such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. The move could open the way for increased coverage of the surgeries by private insurance companies, which have differed greatly in their policies. Neil Hutcher, president of the American Society for Bariatric Surgery and a surgeon in Richmond, Va.

A study of bariatric surgery on California adolescents shows that growing numbers of families are opting for a surgical solution to their children's obesity. But a study on trends in bariatric surgery among those under 21 shows that, in this population, the surgical weight-loss technique is disproportionately embraced by girls, and by white adolescents in general. The study , published this week in the journal Pediatrics, tallies a dramatic increase in weight-loss surgery between 2005 and 2007, with a surgical procedure not yet approved by the FDA for use on children showing the steepest rise.

News from the Obesity Society annual meeting in San Diego: -- Doctors have tried inserting a balloon into the stomach to make a person feel full so he won't eat as much and will lose weight. Now scientists are turning to a similar strategy that involves swallowing a capsule. -- Researchers in Calgary reported Sunday that they had devised fake food, or pseudofood, to make people feel fuller. The method involved filling a gelatin capsule made of biocompatible and biodegradable materials with expandable, absorbent fiber and polymer granules.

This is list of preventable conditions for which Medicaid will no longer pay: • Foreign Object Retained After Surgery • Air Embolism • Blood Incompatibility • Stage III and IV Pressure Ulcers • Falls and Trauma • Fractures • Dislocations • Intracranial Injuries • Crushing Injuries • Burns • Electric Shock • Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infection (UTI) • Vascular Catheter-Associated Infection • Manifestations of Poor Glycemic Control • Diabetic Ketoacidosis • Nonketotic Hyperosmolar Coma • Hypoglycemic Coma • Secondary Diabetes with Ketoacidosis • Secondary Diabetes with Hyperosmolarity • Surgical Site Infection Following: • Coronary Artery Bypass Graft (CABG)

Weight-loss surgery has been reserved for people who are morbidly obese, with a body mass index of 40 or greater. However, both gastric bypass surgery and adjustable gastric banding surgery is increasingly performed on less-obese people. That may be a good thing, according to a new study. Researchers at Stanford University looked at the outcomes of 981 people who had gastric bypass surgery. The patient's BMIs ranged from below 35 to greater than 50. The lower-BMI patients had better outcomes than the higher-BMI patients.

Surgically induced weight loss produces as much as a 40% reduction in deaths in the 10 years after the operation, two large studies reported today. Researchers already knew that bariatric surgery sharply reduced diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol, in addition to improving appearance and quality of life. But the new studies, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, are the first to document a long-suspected link between weight loss and survival.

Gastric bypass surgery for weight loss doubles the risk of developing alcoholism compared with Lap-Band surgery, Swedish researchers reported Monday. Researchers already knew that bypass surgery allows the body to absorb alcohol quicker, but the new findings, reported at the Digestive Diseases Week meeting in Chicago, are the first to suggest an increased risk of problems associated with the effect. Dr. Magdalena Plecka Ostlund of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and her colleagues examined medical records for 12,277 patients who underwent bariatric surgery in Sweden between 1980 and 2006.

Surgery has surged in popularity as a way to treat severe obesity. Today, it appears safe enough that some surgeons are testing it in children. Most people who are tremendously obese can't shed their weight through diet and exercise. For more than 50 years, surgeons have offered them another way: shorten or diminish the capacity of the gut. The first operations in 1954 cut out most of the small intestine, says Dr.

Bariatric surgery works, if measured in hospital days and medicine costs 20 years after the operation, according to one of the new studies on obesity published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. Gastric bypass surgery was shown to help severely obese patients, most of whom after six years had sustained an average weight loss of nearly 28% of their weight. For six years after their surgery, the patients in a Swedish study used more hospital days after bariatric surgery than obese people who didn't have the surgery, but in years 7 to 20 did not. The Swedish study, to be published Wednesday, included 1,010 adults who had surgery and 2,037 who did not. The study looked at long-term healthcare use. Of the surgery patients, 13% had gastric bypass, 19% gastric banding and the rest vertical-banded gastroplasty, a procedure no longer commonly performed.

The daily gloom that many obese people endure is almost impossible to comprehend for the never-heavy. Struggles with irresistible urges to eat, weight-related health problems and embarrassment aren't always understood or received with sympathy; "just stop eating" is the simplistic advice usually offered by people who haven't a clue. "Fat: What No One Is Telling You," a new 90-minute PBS documentary, offers a more compassionate take on this thorny issue continually in the news.