“What is gastric bypass surgery?”
I'm starting to develop health problems related to being overweight and trying to get my weight under control. What are the benefits of gastric bypass surgery?
3 Answers
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Classic gastric bypass involves making a small pouch of the upper stomach, dividing the small bowel 60 cm below the ligament of treitz, sewing the distal bowel to the small pouch, and then sewing the proximal small bowel to the distal limb. Roux en Y, the small bowel has a Y shape. Food doesn’t pass through the lower stomach, and so avoids the duodenum and its “signal” to your body to resist glucose uptake. It’s not your body fat that causes Type 2 DM, but the complexities of a metabolic syndrome. Blood sugars go down immediately post-op, and you won’t have lost much weight that soon. So far, these signals from the duodenum haven’t been found definitively.
A gastric bypass is both a weight loss operation and a metabolic surgery.
First, estimated weight loss with a gastric bypass are up to 75% of your excess body weight. If you are 100 lbs overweight, you could expect to lose about 75 lbs over the course of the first 12-18 months after surgery. Some patients do better than this; some do not. That is a pretty good average.
Second, a gastric bypass can improve all of the medical problems associated with the disease of obesity. Those include high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, sleep apnea, and reflux. It can also decrease your risk of developing heart disease and cancer. The results are stunning!
If your doctor offered patients a single pill to cure all of these diseases, everyone would be signing up. Instead, because it has "surgery" associated with it, unfortunately there is a negative stigma. There shouldn't be. A weight loss operation is life changing for more than 90% of patients who have it done.
First, estimated weight loss with a gastric bypass are up to 75% of your excess body weight. If you are 100 lbs overweight, you could expect to lose about 75 lbs over the course of the first 12-18 months after surgery. Some patients do better than this; some do not. That is a pretty good average.
Second, a gastric bypass can improve all of the medical problems associated with the disease of obesity. Those include high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, sleep apnea, and reflux. It can also decrease your risk of developing heart disease and cancer. The results are stunning!
If your doctor offered patients a single pill to cure all of these diseases, everyone would be signing up. Instead, because it has "surgery" associated with it, unfortunately there is a negative stigma. There shouldn't be. A weight loss operation is life changing for more than 90% of patients who have it done.
