Gastric Bypass Surgery Found Safe and Effective in Adolescent Severe Obesity

MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr Torsten Olbers PhD

Department of Gastrosurgical Research
Institute of Clinical Sciences
University of Gothenburg, Sahlgrenska University Hospital
Gothenburg Sweden 

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: The background to study was the lack of effective treatments for adolescents with severe obesity and the observation that many adults undergoing gastric bypass regret that they didn’t´t do it earlier.

The medical indication is to hopefully prevent development of diseases and organ damage due to cardiovascular risk factors and to enable them to have normalised psychosocial development (education, relation etc).

In fact most of the adolescents undergoing surgery had parents having undergone surgery.

MedicalResearch.com: What should readers take away from your report?

Response:  Gastric surgery is safe and effective in the treat leading to substantial long term weight loss, improved cardiovascular health and quality of life.

We assess positive effects to outweigh risk of negative effects and risk for complications (additional surgery and nutritional deficiencies).

There are certain challenges in the treatment of adolescents making us recommend that it should only be performed within programs having ability to deliver long term follow up and support.

The study is the first prospectively following an adolescent control group parallel to the surgical group now reporting the 5y outcome with high quality data. In addition we were able to have a 100% follow up in national health care registries.

MedicalResearch.com: What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this study?

  1.  A randomised trial between bariatric surgery and intense conservative treatment (AMOS 2) is currently ongoing in Sweden.
  2. We still need to follow the long term outcomes of adolescents undergoing bariatric surgery.
  3. Studies between different surgical techniques (Sleeve and Gastric bypass)
  4. We are also discussing formal integration of bariatric surgery in programs for treatment of adolescents with severe obesity but we still need to look for possible long term negative effects
  5. Defining ideal age for intervention
  6. Ddentifying possible contraindications

MedicalResearch.com: Thank you for your contribution to the MedicalResearch.com community.

Citation:

Laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass in adolescents with severe obesity (AMOS): a prospective, 5-year, Swedish nationwide study

Dr Torsten Olbers, PhDPress enter key for correspondence information

Andrew J Beamish, MD,Eva Gronowitz, PhD, Carl-Erik Flodmark, PhD
Jovanna Dahlgren, PhD, Gustaf Bruze, PhD, Kerstin Ekbom, PhD, Peter Friberg, PhD
Gunnar Göthberg, PhD,Kajsa Järvholm, PhD, Jan Karlsson, PhD, Staffan Mårild, PhD
Martin Neovius, PhD, Markku Peltonen, PhD, Claude Marcus, PhD

Published: 05 January 2017

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2213-8587(16)30424-7

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Last Updated on January 7, 2017 by Marie Benz MD FAAD