|
HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Would Obesity Surgery Help Older Men Prolong Life? When a person is overweight, doctor would usually advise him or her to adopt healthy diet and perform more physical activities on a more regular basis, and in rare cases doctor might also prescribe slimming medications. But when a person is obese, very often the doctor would recommend bariatric surgery; especially this person also has multiple diseases like diabetes and heart disease. According to recommendation by the United States National Institutes of Health, obese people with a body mass index (BMI) of at least 40, and people with BMI 35 and serious coexisting medical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease or sleep apnea, bariatric surgery should be a viable option. Bariatric surgery, also known as weight-loss surgery, includes a number of procedures performed on obese people. While some procedures limit amount of food one can take, others restrict amount of food one can digest. In most cases, people who have undergone surgery can lose weight quickly, and they should be able to keep most of the weight off if they can strictly follow recommended diet and exercise regularly. Nevertheless, bariatric surgery does carry some risks and complications including infections, hernias and blood clots. Some long-term studies have shown that bariatric surgery can achieve significant long-term weight loss, help recovery from diabetes, improve cardiovascular risk factors and reduce mortality from 40 percent to 23 percent.
However, researchers from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina and University of Texas Southwestern School of Medicine found that bariatric surgery did not raise survival rate for older, severely obese people, at least during the first 7 years. The new study suggested that not everyone gained equally from surgery and a survival benefit might be seen later in older men, after more years of follow-up. Their findings were published on June 15, 2001 in the ‘Journal of the American Medical Association’. The new evidence was rather surprising because previous studies have found stomach stapling and other obesity surgeries improved survival rates after 2 to 10 years, though these findings derived mainly from studies of mostly younger women. According to researchers, these studies were conducted on very different patient populations using less rigorous methods. Some experts also argued that weight loss surgery might be too late to reverse a patient’s organ damage, unless the patient opted for surgery earlier for a survival benefit. In the study, researchers compared nearly 850 patients who had surgery in Veterans Affairs hospitals with other obese veterans. All the surgery patients had gastric bypass, which makes the stomach smaller by stapling. It allows food to skip much of the small intestine. A smaller stomach means less food is held and the digestive detour means the body absorbs fewer calories. The 2 groups were similar with matched age, gender, race and marital status. After nearly 7 years, the 2 groups were equally likely to be alive. A lower death rate in the surgery group was noted, compared to a group of obese patients who did not undergo surgery. The average age of patients, who underwent surgery between 2000 and 2006, was 40 and their average BMI was 47. A person with a BMI of 30 and above is already considered obese. 11 patients died within the first month after surgery, a rare 4 times higher than in other studies. It is possible that the surgery is harder in men than in women. Women tend to collect fat in the thighs and hips rather than abdomen. Fat accumulated in the belly makes it trickier for doctors to get through it to the organs.
Some experts feared that the new findings that
showed higher death rate after
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Copyright
2007-2012 © HowToPreventHeartDisease.com . All Rights Reserved.d........ |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
