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Weight-loss operations, survival linked

Surgeries cut the risk of dying, studies show.

LOS ANGELES - The first long-term studies of stomach stapling and other radical obesity treatments show that they not only lead to lasting weight loss but also dramatically improve survival. The results are expected to lead to more such operations, possibly for less severely obese people, too.

Researchers in Sweden and the United States separately found that obese people who underwent drastic surgery had a 30 percent to 40 percent lower risk of dying seven to 10 years later, compared with those who did not have such operations.

Researchers already knew that bariatric surgery sharply reduces diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol. But the new studies, reported in today's New England Journal of Medicine, are the first to document a long-suspected link between weight loss and survival.

Obesity surgeries have surged in recent years, along with global waistlines. In the United States alone, 177,600 operations were performed last year, according to the American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery.

The most common method was gastric bypass, or stomach-stapling surgery, which reduces the stomach to a walnut-sized pouch and bypasses part of the small intestine, where digestion occurs.

The Swedish study is the longest look yet at how obesity surgery affects mortality. Researchers led by Dr. Lars Sjostrom of Goteborg University compared 4,047 people with a body-mass index higher than 34 who had one of three types of surgery or received standard diet advice. BMI is a standard measure of height and weight; those with a BMI higher than 30 are considered obese.

After a decade, those in the surgery group lost 14 percent to 25 percent of their original weight, compared with 2 percent in the other group. Of the 2,010 surgery patients, 101 died. There were 129 deaths in the comparison group of 2,037.

In the U.S. study, Ted Adams of the University of Utah led a team that looked at 7,925 severely obese people in the state who had gastric bypass operations.

They were matched with similar people who did not have the operation and who were selected through their driver's license records listing height and weight.

After an average of seven years' followup, 213 of the people who had had surgery died, compared with 321 who had not had the procedure. The study did not look at weight loss.

Deaths from diabetes in the surgery group were dramatically cut by 92 percent; deaths from cancer, by 60 percent; and deaths from heart disease, by 56 percent. But the surgery group had a higher risk of death from accidents, suicides and other causes not related to disease, which puzzled the researchers.

Information from the Los Angeles Times was used in this report.

[Last modified August 23, 2007, 01:07:06]