Is bariatric surgery more effective in treating obesity among teenagers?

Obesity is a grave problem as it may lead to serious health conditions in future. Apparently, laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding surgery can be used to efficiently treat obesity among teenagers and appears to provide an improved substitute as compared to gastric bypass surgery. But scientists claim that more researches are required to find out whether it is better than nonsurgical alternatives.

Treatment of obesity among the youth ought to be of main concern since obesity seems to signify other diseases like cardiac troubles, hypertension and diabetes, afterward in life. Several doctors are said to be hesitant to advocate weight-loss surgery as an obesity treatment option for young people owing to the dearth of research and data illustrating its efficacy.

Dr. Edward Livingston, chief of GI/endocrine surgery at UT Southwestern, commented, “The latest research helps us define which surgical procedure may be preferable, but we are still a long way from settling the question of whether surgery should be used to treat obesity in teens.”

While gastric bypass surgery appears to eternally modify the stomach, laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding surgery may be overturned and seems to encompass lesser complications, thereby making it a superior alternative for the still-growing teenage population.

The editorial in the journal where the findings were published, escorts a research by Australian physicians investigating weight-loss surgery among adolescents.

Australian scientists pitted the gastric banding surgery against medically supervised diets among 50 indiscriminately enlisted obese youths. The Australian data apparently exhibited larger weight loss with patients getting the bands, but impediment rates seem to ask queries about whether it was worth the benefit. Moreover, the researchers discovered that while medical interventions effectively regulated several tricky disease complications devoid of surgery, progress seemed to be more with surgery.

UT Southwestern’s Clinical Center for the Surgical Management of Obesity delivers superior laparoscopic and open gastric bypass and banding surgery to efficiently treat obesity and connected health impediments. UT Southwestern’s specialists have apparently conducted roughly 4,000 procedures and have tutored over 100 surgeons from across the U.S. to perform laparoscopic gastric bypass and adjustable gastric banding.

The research was published in the Journal of the American Heart medical Association.