Health experts consider bariatric surgery, which reduces the size of the stomach by using a gastric band, removing certain parts of the stomach or resecting the small intestines, as the most effective treatment for obese individuals who failed to lose weight through dieting and physical exercise.
The procedure is linked with long term weight loss among severely obese individuals and findings of a new study suggests it can even lower cancer risks in morbidly obese individuals who have a body mass index (BMI) of at least 40.
For the new study published in the Springer's journal Obesity Surgery, Beatriz Schaan, from the Hospital Sao Lucas in Brazil and colleagues analyzed the results of 13 studies on the incidence of cancer in those who underwent bariatric surgery and which all involved more than 54,000 individuals.
The researchers observed that the prevalence of cancer in obese individuals was as high as two per 1,000 person-years, the number of years multiplied with the number of people in the population that have a particular illness, but the rate went down to one per 1,000 person-years in those who had the surgery or almost the same as the rate in people with normal weight.
Cy Stein, from the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, California said that the reduction in cancer risks associated with weight loss surgery is possibly true because obesity is linked with increased risks for cancer even in individuals who are modestly obese and that obesity is a risk factor for the development of the disease.
"The evidence that obesity is related to an increased risk of cancer is significant, even in the modestly obese," Stein told HealthDay. "There is an association [between obesity and cancer]. It is a risk factor for cancer development."
Meanwhile, findings of another set of studies provide evidence that weight loss surgery has positive impact on diabetes. A study conducted by Anita Courcoulas, from the Department of Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and colleagues and which was published in the JAMA Surgery on June 4, tracked 61 obese individuals with diabetes who either underwent a lifestyle-based weight control program or bariatric surgery.
A year later, 50 percent of those who had gastric bypass surgery and 25 percent of those who had gastric banding had partial remission of diabetes, which means that they had blood sugar levels that were almost the same as the normal range and do not need to take diabetes drugs, while none of those who did not have surgery had remission of their diabetes.
A similar study conducted by Allison Goldfine, from the Joslin Diabetes Center of the Harvard Medical School, in Boston, Massachusetts, and colleagues, which was also published in the JAMA Surgery on June 4 and involved 38 obese individuals who underwent either a group weight loss program or a gastric bypass surgery, yielded the same results with 11 of the 19 individuals who had bariatric surgery meeting their goal to reduce their blood sugar levels compared with three of the 19 individuals in the weight loss program.
"These differences may help inform therapeutic decisions for diabetes and weight loss strategies in obese patients with type 2 diabetes until larger randomized trials are performed," Goldfine and colleagues wrote.
