5 Things To Consider Before Delaying Gastric Bypass Surgery

Gastric bypass surgery is very much a last resort for a lot of people and something to be avoided as long a possible while they look at all of their other options. In fact, in most cases patients are helped in this by their doctor who will often insist on a program of diet and exercise before even considering referring a patient to a bariatric surgeon. But is this approach sensible?

Apart from the fact that almost everybody agrees that exercise and diet programs do not work for the vast majority of people, there is strong evidence to show that delaying surgery is putting patients at risk.

In a recent study the records of more than 2,000 people who underwent weight loss surgery between 1995 and 2004 in the same medical center were studies. The researchers wished to see whether there were any factors which could have been used to predict the risks for these patients before they had surgery and the researchers identified 5 things that they believed increased a patient's risk of surgery.

The factor was gender with women being at lower risk than men. The second was having a BMI (body mass index) in excess of 50. The third factor was age with people under 45 being at lower risk. The fourth factor was the presence of hypertension (high blood pressure), frequently linked to cardiovascular disease. The final factor was previous evidence of a blood clot in the lungs (pulmonary embolus) or a proclivity for this condition.

The researchers went on to award one point for the existence of each of these factors and split the overall study group into those at high, medium and low risk depending on their scores. Next, they examined the death rates for these three groups and discovered that the death reate in the low risk group was 0.31%, in the medium risk group it was 1.9% and in the high risk group it was 7.56%.

Now there is nothing you can do about your gender but, as far as the other four factors are concerned, the effect as far as the risks of gastric bypass surgery are concerned are obvious. Ageing, continuing to put on weight and developing health problems will all increase the risks for surgery. So, if you are morbidly obese, you should think about having surgery early and balance the risks of waiting against the chances of finding a better alternative.