WEIGHT LOSS SURGERY

  MAY PREVENT

 HEART-RELATED DEATHS

 Weight loss surgery lowers the risk of having a  heart attack or stroke, and the risk of death  from these and other heart-realted causes, in    people who are obese, according to new  research in the Journal of the American Medical  Association.

 The findings come from an ongoing Swedish study comparing long-term outcomes among obese patients who did and did not have the surgery.

Over an average of 14 years of follow-up, the bariatric surgery patients lost much more weight and had fewer heart attacks and strokes than people who did not have the surgery.

They were also almost half as likely to die of heart attacks and strokes.

WEIGHT LOSS SURGERY AND THE HEART
But weight loss alone did not appear to explain the difference in outcomes among the two groups, and a patient's pre-surgery weight - as measured by body mass index (BMI) - did not predict the amount of heart health benefit obtained from the bariatric surgery.

Bariatric surgery was associated with about a 30% reduction in the incidence of both heart attacks and strokes, says researcher Lars Sjostrom. MD, PhD, of Sweden's University of Gothenburg.

While pre-surgery BMI did not predict surgical health outcomes, having diabetes was a strong indicator of surgical benefit.

200,000 SURGERIES ANNUALLY IN U.S.
About 200,000 weight loss surgeries are performed each year in the U.S. a tenfold increase since the mid-1990s.

Bariatric surgery has been shown to be very effective for achieving weight loss and for treating type 2 diabetes, but its impact on heart attack and stroke risks has not been widely studied.

The Swedish Obese Subjects (SOS) study includes around 2,000 bariatric surgery patients and a similar number of obese people who did not have the surgery.

Most were in their 40s and 50s when recruited for the study between 1987 and 2001, and all were followed until the end of 2009.

Not surprisingly, patients who had the surgery lost much more weight than those who did not.

The average surgery patients had lost 23% of their body weight two years after the procedure and 16% after 15 years, compared to 0% and 1%, respectively, among the non-surgery group.

Ultimately, bariatric surgery was associated with a 53% reduction in deaths from heart attack and stroke and a 33% kower incidence of these events.

BELLY FAT BETTER PREDICTOR THAN BMI
The finding that having diabetes risk factors such as high blood sugar were a better predictor of surgical benefit than BMI could have implications for selecting candidates for weight loss surgery. Sjostrom and colleagues conclude.

Weight loss surgery researcher Edward H.Livingston, MD, of the University of GTexas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, agrees.

In an editorial published with the study, Livingston writes that obesity alone may not be associated with reduced life span in some people, especially those who don't carry extra fat in their belly area.

Reprinted from WebMD