Stomach stapling and other radical obesity treatments

I'd seen that and was wondering what it was all about. Turns out that stomach stapling is a successful surgical method that not only truly reduces obesity but also prolongs the lives of formerly obese persons.

Would the acronym FOPs be offensive in this context? Not to worry, I am not exactly so slim myself. So there!

Feel better now? Okay, here are the details of the new research on stomach stapling et al:

[....Researchers in Sweden and the United States separately found that obese people who underwent drastic surgery had a 30 percent to 40 percent lower risk of dying seven to 10 years later compared with those who did not have such operations.

The research, published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, should put to rest uncertainties about the benefits and risks of weight-loss surgery and may cause governments and insurers to rethink who should qualify for the procedure, some doctors said.

“It’s going to dispel the notion that bariatric surgery is cosmetic surgery and support the notion that it saves lives,” said Dr. Philip Schauer, director of bariatric surgery at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, who had no role in the research.

More obesity surgeries
Obesity surgeries have surged in recent years along with global waistlines. In the United States alone, 177,600 operations were performed last year, according to the American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery.

The most common method was gastric bypass, or stomach-stapling surgery, which reduces the stomach to a small walnut-sized pouch and bypasses part of the small intestine where digestion occurs.....

Deaths from disease drops
Deaths from diabetes in the surgery group were dramatically cut by 92 percent; from cancer by 60 percent and from heart disease by 56 percent. Surprisingly, the surgery group had a higher risk of death from accidents, suicides and other causes not related to disease. The researchers were puzzled by this....

Both studies were done before surgery advances that have led to smaller incisions and faster recovery time. Experts say future long-term survival rates from obesity surgery should be even better.

While neither study was the gold standard test, where patients are randomly given one treatment or another, surgery’s dramatic benefits make it ethically hard to deny patients the operation, said Dr. George Bray of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University.....

Olitsky, who stands 5 feet 8 inches, underwent stomach-stapling surgery in 1999 and went from 520 pounds to his current weight of 160. He no longer struggles to walk a quarter block and has managed to control his blood pressure and heart rate.....

More than 400 million people worldwide are obese and surgery is the only proven method to shed significant pounds in a short time. In the United States, it costs $17,000 to $35,000 and insurance coverage varies.

Weight-loss surgery is considered relatively safe with the risk of death from the surgery at less than 1 percent. Common complications include nutritional deficiency, gallstones and hernia.....

U.S. guidelines recommend that surgery be considered only after traditional ways to slim down have failed. Candidates must be at least 100 pounds overweight and have a BMI over 40, or a BMI over 35 plus an obesity-related medical condition such as diabetes or high blood pressure....]