If your body mass index (BMI) exceeds 40 and you suffer from severe obesity-related health conditions, bariatric surgery could be the perfect solution to help. Studies show it to be one of the most effective long-term solutions to address class III obesity.
Gastric bypass surgery alters hormones that regulate hunger and satiety, leading to significant weight loss as well as creating a new hormonal weight set point.
Weight Loss
By opting for bariatric surgery, you can achieve significant weight loss. It provides a safe and effective means of treating morbid obesity that’s hard to manage with diet and exercise alone.
This procedure modifies biological factors that contribute to obesity, improving your body’s ability to lose and maintain a healthy weight. Patients typically experience immediate and lasting weight loss following this operation.
At Bariatric Surgery Centers of Excellence (BCSE), your surgeon will reduce your stomach size while bypassing part of the small intestine, creating an environment in which less food reaches your intestines faster and reduces hunger more rapidly than with traditional weight-loss surgeries. Furthermore, this form of bariatric surgery offers more permanent weight loss than other forms of surgery while improving blood sugar control, diabetes management, and overall health outcomes.
Diabetes
Bariatric surgery, especially the Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) and sleeve gastrectomy procedures have proven more successful at managing diabetes than medical therapy alone. For some individuals with type 1 diabetes, bariatric surgery can even put their disease into remission allowing them to stop using insulin injections and oral medication altogether!
Research indicates that these surgeries reduce the amount of glucose produced by your body and improve insulin sensitivity, but the exact cause remains unknown; perhaps due to weight loss coupled with surgical changes made to your gastrointestinal tract?
Controlling your condition through bariatric surgery can help you avoid serious health problems like heart disease, stroke and kidney diseases as well as nerve damage, eye issues and circulation problems.
Joint Pain
Joint pain can be a severe challenge for those living with obesity and can be the result of inflammation, osteoarthritis and other health conditions. Excess weight puts strain on joints – specifically knees – as each additional pound exerts four to six pounds of pressure that over time may cause irreparable damage.
Surgery may help ease joint stress and ease joint pain. Studies have revealed that patients who undergo bariatric procedures such as gastric sleeve or lap band surgery typically lose 50-70% of excess weight through weight reduction surgeries – thus significantly alleviating joint discomfort.
Researchers from UPMC recently conducted research that demonstrated sustained improvements in bodily pain, physical function and usual walking speed seven years following bariatric surgery. Their study was published in JAMA Network Open.
Fertility
Women struggling with pre-pregnancy obesity or PCOS often find that bariatric surgery helps improve fertility rates and pregnancy outcomes.1
Excess weight can create hormonal imbalances that interfere with ovulation cycles and make conception more difficult. Bariatric surgery helps correct these imbalances, making conceiving easier while managing conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).
Restrictive procedures, such as Roux-en-Y gastric bypass and sleeve gastrectomy, as well as malabsorptive procedures like duodenal switch or biliopancreatic diversion with duodenal switch can increase sex hormone secretions among women of reproductive age, leading to spontaneous conception or at least lengthened ovulation cycles2.2
Sleep Apnea
Obstructive sleep apnea causes your breathing to stop briefly multiple times throughout the night, sometimes hundreds of times! This condition can lead to physical and psychological complications such as cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, stroke, diabetes depression irritability as well as poor work and driving performance.
Surgery to create more room in the throat by extracting tonsils, adenoids, or other tissue from within or repositioning jaw can help relieve this type of sleep apnea. Rarely, doctors may perform tracheostomies (creating permanent openings in the windpipe to insert tubes) for severe cases of obstructive sleep apnea.
Bariatric surgery has been shown to significantly reduce or even eradicate obstructive sleep apnea in approximately 85% of those suffering from severe obesity, making this treatment more successful than weight loss alone or CPAP therapy alone.
