5 Things You Ought To Think About Before Putting Off Gastric Bypass Surgery

For many patients gastric bypass surgery is very much a last resort and something to be avoided as long a possible while they explore all of their choices. Indeed, in most cases patients are helped in this by their doctor who will often insist on a program of diet and exercise before referring a patient to a bariatric surgeon. But is this the right approach?

Apart from the fact that most people agree that diet and exercise programs do not work and are a complete waste of time for the vast majority of people, there is excellent evidence to suggest that delaying surgery is putting patient's lives at risk.

In a recently published study the records of over 2,000 patients who had weight loss surgery between 1995 and 2004 in the same medical center were studies. The team carrying out the study wanted to see whether there were any factors which would have predicted the risks for this group of patients before they had surgery and they found 5 things that they believed increased a patient's risk of surgery.

The first of the five factors was gender with men being at higher risk than women. The second was a body mass index (BMI) of over 50. The third was age with people under the age of 45 being at lower risk. The fourth was the presence of high blood pressure, often related to cardiovascular disease. The last factor was previous evidence of pulmonary embolus (a blood clot in the lungs) or a predisposition for this condition.

The researchers then awarded one point for the existence of each factor and split the overall study group into those at high, medium and low risk depending on their scores. Next, they examined the death rates for these three groups and found 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, as far as the other four factors are concerned, the effect as far as the complications of obesity surgery are concerned are clear. Ageing, continuing to gain weight and developing health problems will all raise the risks for surgery. So, if you are morbidly obese, then perhaps you should think about undergoing surgery early and balance the risks involved in waiting against the possibility of finding a successful alternative.