5 Things to Think About Before Putting Off Weight Loss Surgery

For a lot of 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 people are assisted in this by their doctor who, following tradition, will insist on an extended program of diet and exercise before referring a patient for surgery. But is this the correct approach?

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

In a recent study the records of more than 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 wished to see if there were any factors which would have predicted the risks faced by these patients before they had surgery and they found 5 things that they believed increased a patient's risk of surgery.

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

The team went on to award a point for the existence of each of these factors and split the study group into those at high, medium and low risk according to their scores. Next, they examined the death rate for each of these three groups and found that the death reate in the low risk group was 0.31%, in the medium risk group it was 1.9% and in the high risk group it was 7.56%.

Of course there is not much you can do about your gender but, as far as the other factors are concerned, the effect as far as the complications of gastric bypass surgery are concerned are clear. Getting older, continuing to put on weight and developing health problems will all increase the risks posed by surgery. Accordingly, if you are suffering from morbid obesity, then perhaps you should think about having surgery early and balance the risks of waiting against the possibility of finding a successful alternative.