laparoscopic

What is Bariatric Surgery or Weight Loss Surgery?

Am I a candidate?

Laparoscopic  surgery for obesity is for people who are severely overweight.

What is severe overweight?
Severe obesity, sometimes knows as “morbid obesity”, is defined as having a weight of 100 pounds (45.5 kg) or 100% above the ideal body weight (see I am a candidate). Obesity represents a chronic disease that is associated to the evolution of complications that threaten a person’s life:  high blood pressure (hypertension) and sugar in the blood (diabetes) and coronary artery disease, among others.

Numerous approaches have been recommended for this problem, including low-caloric diets, medication, behavior modification and exercise therapy.  However, the only proven efficient treatment for long term control of morbid obesity is surgical intervention.

Causes of Severe Obesity: the cause of severe obesity is not known for sure.  It is possible that severe obesity results from a combination of genetic, psycho-social, environmental, social and cultural factors that interact and result in a complex problem that affect both appetite regulation and energy metabolism.  Severe obesity does not seem to be a simple lack of control on the part of the patient.

Metabolic Surgery: Metabolic surgery has recently been recognized as the bariatric surgery for patients with hypertension and type II diabetes.  With this surgery, we have been able to observe obese patients with type II diabetes and hypertension that report important cures to their diseases:  we observed up to 86% cure in blood glucose and up to 60% cure in hypertension.  And, in those patients where these diseases were not cured, we observed a significant reduction in the dose and number of drugs taken to treat such problems.

The recent boom of these surgical techniques is due to the fact that all the different procedures (adjustable gastric band  , gastric sleeve,  and gastric by-pass in Y de Roux  ), can be done laparoscopically, that is, in a minimally invasive way.

The benefits of the approach through laparoscopic  surgery or minimally invasive surgery vs. traditional open surgery, are:

  • Less post-operatory pain
  • Less hospital stay
  • Less incidence of adherence formation or infection in the surgical site
  • Faster re-insertion to the daily life of the patient
  • Less possibility of formation of post-operatory hernia, among others.
Am I a candidate?

Weight:
Kg.
Height:
mts (1 feet = 0.3048 meters)
Results:
(BMI)
Enter your personal information (height and weight).