Treating obesity since surgery
Written by:Although obesity is an individual medical condition, it has become a serious public health problem, since its prevalence is 0.5% of adults in Spain and tends to double every 5 to 10 years.
The repeated failure of conventional medical-dietetic treatment makes it necessary to opt for other therapeutic alternatives that facilitate, by means of a progressive reduction of weight , to abandon the risk situation in which patients suffering from morbid obesity are found. This has led to the development of various surgical techniques, Bariatric Surgery , this being the part of surgery that deals with the surgical treatment of obesity.
For surgery of morbid obesity we have various surgical techniques: restrictive ones such as the gastric band , whose objective is to reduce the capacity of the stomach to obtain a sensation of early satiety, the drawback is that the patient can only eat very small amounts. There are also malabsorptive techniques such as the duodenal switch, in which weight loss is achieved by disabling a large part of the small intestine, achieving weight loss without reducing the amount of intake. And finally there are mixed techniques such as gastric bypass where the size of the stomach is reduced and at the same time the length of the intestine is reduced, achieving greater efficiency than in the restrictive techniques with better quality of life. After all surgeries, changes in the patient's bad eating habits or sedentary lifestyle are fundamental.. The disadvantage of malabsorptive techniques is that they are exposed to an increased risk of metabolic alterations, which is why they require more strict control by their endocrinologist after surgery.
It is not a surgery of convenience or aesthetic purposes, but it is a set of surgical techniques, some of them very complex, designed to solve an important disease, hence its indication, performance and subsequent control requires extreme rigor. All patients with a BMI equal to or greater than 40kg / m2, or greater than 35 if they have associated comorbidities (diabetes, hypertension ...) are candidates for this type of surgery.. It is essential to confirm the chronic nature of the situation and its resistance to conventional treatment, as well as the absence of contraindications.
The surgical treatment of obesity requires a unit that incorporates different specialists - endocrinologists, dieticians, digestologists, endoscopists and psychologists - who work together to obtain the best results for each case.
