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The Role of Weight Loss Surgery Patient Perspective on Weight Loss Surgery What Is Morbid Obesity and What Can Be Done? What Are the Different Types of Surgery for Obesity?

Diet and Weight Loss

Understanding Gastric Surgery

Summary & Participants

Weight loss surgery can provide health benefits to those who qualify. How do you know which surgery is right for you? It's important to know the advantages and disadvantages associated with the different types of surgeries.

Medically Reviewed On: July 03, 2008

Webcast Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Obesity is reaching epidemic proportions in the United States, with an estimated nine million Americans falling into the category of morbidly obese. Traditional methods of losing weight are unsuccessful for many people, so some people who are extremely overweight increasingly are turning to weight loss surgery.

JAIME PONCE, MD: The purpose of weight loss surgery is to improve the health of morbidly obese patients. To improve the health, meaning that the medical problems that they have they can resolve or improve, or to prevent those medical problems from happening.

ANNOUNCER: Body mass index, or BMI, is the index commonly used to determine if someone is overweight or obese. It is based on a person's weight relative to his or her height. A normal BMI is 18.5 to 24.9. A score equal to or above 25 is considered overweight. A score equal to or above 30 is considered obese. And a score equal to or above 40 is considered extremely obese.

JAIME PONCE, MD: An ideal candidate for surgery is somebody that has a BMI, a body mass index, of 40 or more, which is about 100 pounds or more above their ideal weight; or somebody that has a BMI in between 35 and 40 with associated medical problems. In addition to that, the person needs to be an adult. The person has to be overweight for at least five years, and has to have tried to lose weight before, several times, and failed.

ANNOUNCER: There are three main types of surgical procedures designed to promote weight loss in obese people.

GEORGE WOODMAN, MD: The first is malabsorptive procedures, and those procedures are designed to help a person not absorb much of what they eat.

ANNOUNCER: Malabsorptive surgeries shorten the length of a patient's small intestine and changes where it connects to the stomach, thus causing food to be poorly digested and incompletely absorbed. These procedures are the least commonly performed weight loss surgeries.

GEORGE WOODMAN, MD: The two most commonly performed types of weight loss surgery are restrictive procedures and combined procedures. Restrictive procedures reduce how much the stomach can hold.

ANNOUNCER: Adjustable gastric banding is a restrictive procedure. A silicon band is implanted around the very top of a patient's stomach. The band narrows the stomach so that a small pouch forms above the band. Following surgery, the patient's doctor can inject saline into the band to tighten the band to increase the restriction.

GEORGE WOODMAN, MD: Combined procedures restrict how much the stomach can hold, but they also reduce how much you absorb, but to a smaller extent than the malabsorptive procedures by themselves.

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