Choose the Right Weight Loss Surgery
If you are morbidly obese and have a hard time controlling your eating, a recent study at McGill University should cause you to consider weight loss surgery. We have long known that excess weight is a major health risk, however researchers have now learned that gastric bypass surgery can cut the risks of breast tumors by 85% and colon cancer by 70%. But which weight loss surgery is right for you?
Instructions
1. Understand the basics. There are two approaches to weight loss surgery. Creating a restriction that decreases food intake, and shrinking stomach size while also altering digestion so that the food's nutrients are incompletely absorbed and eliminated in the stool.
2. Gastric Restrictive Procedure is also known as Vertical Banded Gastroplasty, VBG. The upper stomach near the esophagus is stapled vertically for 2 ? inches making the stomach smaller. The stomach's outlet is then restricted by a band or ring. Since a smaller stomach is created, the patient fills it with less food. The advantage of this kind of surgery is that the food is digested normally. Follow up studies have shown that patients average 50% of their targeted weight loss over ten years. In some cases, leakage can occur around the staples and they can get infected. Also, the stomach pouch could stretch.
3. Lap Band surgery is also restrictive, but is easily reversible. It's not considered a permanent solution. This is a minimally invasive procedure guided laparoscopically by a video camera. An adjustable band is used to constrict a portion of the stomach. The tightness of the band is controlled by a saline solution that a surgeon later can inject or draw down after the original operation.
4. Malabsorptive Procedures also reduce the size of the stomach, but to a lesser degree. Its major goal is to divert the bile and pancreatic juices so that they are act on the food to limit body's assimilation of calories and nutrients. There are three:
5. Biliopancreatic Diversion, BPD removes 75% of the stomach which reduces both food intake and acid production. Part of the small intestine is attached directly to the stomach. All food passes through here, but not much is absorbed. The bile and pancreatic juices digest move down the second part of the small intestine through what is now known as the "biliopancreatic limb," which connects to the food path close to the end. The food is only digested and absorbed from this point on. The length of the so called "common limb can be varied by a surgeon to affect the degree of nutrient absorption.
6. In BPD with a duodenal switch portion of the stomach is removed, but the stomach stays attached to the duodenum, the upper part of the small intestine. The duodenum is attached to the lower part of the small intestine, bypassing most of it so that fewer nutrients are absorbed.
7. Roux-en-Y gastric bypass consists of stapling most of the stomach closed, leaving it there but creating a small pouch. The outlet of the pouch empties into the lower part of the small intestine to limit nutrient absorption. The procedure creates the Y illustrated which gives the technique its name. Roux-en-Y is the most popular weight loss surgery because of the amount of weight loss, which can be ? of a person's excess body weight after a year.
