Obese patients who have undergone bariatric surgery for weight loss have a death rate twice as low at 4.5 years of follow-up than obese adults on diets and non-surgical treatment strategies. The bypass seems to be the most efficient technique from this point of view.
Much is known about the short-term results of weight loss surgery and its great effectiveness in weight loss, but little is known about its long-term effects.
Some earlier studies suffered from limitation due to a number of factors, including the lack of a comparator group of obese patients who had not undergone bariatric surgery.
For this new study, published in JAMA, 8,385 Israeli obese patients who underwent bariatric surgery from 2005 to 2014 were solicited as well as 25,155 patients who received non-surgical care for the management of obesity.
Obesity cannot be managed on its own
This is an observational study and researchers cannot control all of the interactions with the environment that could explain the results.
The death rate from all causes over about four and a half years is lower in obese patients who underwent weight loss surgery (1.3%) than in patients who managed their obesity more traditionally (2.3%), a statistically significant difference.
The only downside with regard to this work, the imbalances between the 2 groups of obese patients according to age, sex, body mass index and diagnosis of diabetes. After adjusting for these differences between the groups, bariatric surgery halves all-cause mortality compared to diet alone, and the results would be best with “by-pass” type surgery, versus sleeve and rings.
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