Bariatric Surgery Helps Obese Patients Live Longer

Obese individuals can extend their lifespan with bariatric surgery, according to recent findings published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

For the study, 2,500 obese patients and nearly 7,500 matched controls received medical attention across the United States in the department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health system.

Statistics show that an increasing number of Americans are becoming severely obese and in need of the procedure. Qualifications include those with a BMI between 35 and 39.9 with obesity related health conditions, including type 2 diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea, high blood pressure, osteoarthritis and other obesity related conditions.

"We expanded what we've been learning and showed that older men in this study do just as well after bariatric surgery as younger women in previous studies have done," said David Arterburn, MD, MPH, a Group Health physician and a Group Health Research Institute associate investigator. Dr. Arterburn, who is also an affiliate associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, is the first author of the report, called "Association between bariatric surgery and long-term survival ."

"Previous studies of long-term survival after bariatric surgery involved younger, mostly female populations who tended to have few obesity-related diseases," he said, in a news release. "In contrast, our study's population was older-with a mean age of 52-and 74 percent male. Also 55 percent of our population had diabetes, and many had other diseases such as high blood pressure, arthritis, heart disease, and depression."

"We also found evidence that bariatric surgery has become safer," said Matthew Maciejewski, PhD, a research career scientist in Health Services Research and Development at the Durham VA and a professor of general internal medicine at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, NC. "We found that the risk of dying during and soon after bariatric surgery was lower in 2006-2011 than in 2000-2005."

In the future, researchers hope to further examine various information, including if bariatric surgery helps certain subgroups of patients more or less, to what extent weight loss lasts following surgery and to what extent certain diseases, such as diabetes, improve over time. 

For more great nature science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).