Fighting Obesity: Surgery or Lifestyle Modification?

摘要

An increasingly popular response to morbid obesity affecting both adults and adolescents lies with bariatric surgery—gastric-restrictive and intestinal-bypass procedures. With the widespread public awareness of bariatric surgery, there has been a near explosion in the number of practitioners in the community who perform these operations. Similarly, the number of major academic centers with bariatric surgery programs has dramatically increased in the past several years. We readily, even enthusiastically, acknowledge that with careful patient selection and fine operation performed in a first-rate center, some morbidly obese patients with significant medical co-morbidities may lose hundreds of pounds and recover an otherwise lost life.