More on Teens and Lap Bands

“You don’t want to wait until they are adults and having heart attacks,”
Dr. Marc Bessler – New York Presbyterian Hospital

I’m looking around a little bit more on this subject of adolescents and Lap Bands. There seems to be a concensus that it’s an appropriate for surgery for kids starting somewhere around the age of thirteen. There have been a number of studies done and the results are all pretty positive – which is good news, I think. I’m sure more than a few of my readers were overweight as teenagers, and I’m betting it’s a painful way to go through some tough years.

Here’s a study from the NYU Medical Center:

Lap band surgery was performed on 53 morbidly obese adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17, according to the study. Most of the patients were girls. People are considered morbidly obese when their body mass index is at 40 or above, usually about 100 pounds overweight.

The patients in the study had a history of obesity for at least 5 years and many had conditions commonly found in obese adults such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and sleep apnea. They had also tried unsuccessfully to lose weight on numerous diet and exercise regimens, including medically supervised weight loss, according to the study. All of the adolescents were screened by a psychologist to ensure that they would comply with the study protocol.

The first conclusion of the article is that the Lap Band is safer than a gastric bypass:

“This study suggests that the lap band provides a safer and equally effective weight loss strategy compared to the gastric bypass,” said Evan Nadler, M.D., Director of Pediatric Minimally Invasive Surgery and Assistant Professor of Surgery at New York University School of Medicine, who is the lead author of the study. “This is good news for parents contemplating obesity surgery for their adolescent children. The bypass has serious risks and side effects associated with it and our study shows that the band provides similar weight loss benefits without the same risks.” Intestinal leakage and bleeding, blockage of the intestines, and severe nutritional deficiency are some of the side effects associated with the bypass procedure.

And then, the kids lose weight:

According to the study, twelve and eighteen months following their surgery, the average weight loss for each patient was about 50 percent of excess weight, a figure comparable to weight loss following a gastric bypass procedure. None of the patients regained any lost weight, which has occurred after gastric bypass procedures, said Dr. Nadler.

There were a few complications but they were all minor and did not require hospitalization:

Complications were found to be significantly less severe with the band procedure as well. None of the gastric band patients in the study had complications that required readmission to the hospital. Two patients experienced slippage of the band, two patients developed hiatal hernias, and one patient had a wound infection. All of these conditions were treated by outpatient procedures. According to the study, a few patients also experienced mild hair loss and iron deficiency which were treated with nutritional counseling and vitamin supplementation.