5 Things To Consider Before Putting Off Obesity Surgery

For a lot of people weight loss surgery is very much a last resort and something to be avoided as long a possible while they explore all of their other options. In fact, in the majority of cases patients are helped in this by their doctor who, following tradition, will insist on a program of diet and exercise before even considering referring a patient for surgery. But is this the right approach?

Apart from the simple fact that just about everyone 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 actually putting patients at risk.

In a recent study the records of more than 2,000 patients who had weight loss surgery between 1995 and 2004 in one particular medical center were examined. The team carrying out the study wanted to see if there were any factors which would have predicted the risks for these patients before they underwent surgery and they identified 5 things which they felt increased a patient’s risk from surgery.

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

The researchers went on to award one point for the presence of each of these factors and split the study group into those at high, medium and low risk depending on their scores. Next, they looked at the death rate for each of 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 weight loss surgery are concerned are clear. Getting older, continuing to gain weight and developing health problems will all raise the risks for surgery. So, if you are morbidly obese, then perhaps you should consider having surgery early and balance the risks involved in waiting against the possibility of finding a successful alternative.