A two-year-old boy from Saudi Arabia became the youngest morbidly obese person in the world to undergo weight loss surgery, weighing almost 73 pounds at just 18 months in 2010, news.com.au reports.
According to the report from the International Journal of Surgery, the two-year-old originally had a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 41, was it was determined to have the surgery as he suffered from sleep apnea, which doctors wrote had increased "substantially" over time. Previous attempts to control his weight and diet had failed, though octors were unable to ascertain whether or not the child's parents had stuck to the diet.
The surgery the doctors carried out on the child was irreversible, a Laparoscopic Sleeve Gastrectomy (LSG), which involves removing the outer margins of the stomach to restrict food intake.
"To our knowledge LSG has never been tried in very young age children," the surgeons wrote in their report. "We present here probably the first case report of the successful management of a two year old morbidly obese boy."
According to the child's parents, he weighed just 6.6 pounds at birth, a healthy and normal weight for a baby. But by 6 months, they began to notice that he looked "chubby and overweight," as he weighed 21 pounds. At 14-months-old, the boy weighed an alarming 47 pounds and had a BMI of 29. A strict diet and medications reportedly did nothing to stop his weight gain.
The two-year-old boy became the youngest person in the world to undergo weight loss surgery of this kind. Prior to his surgery, the youngest was a 5-year-old boy, also from Saudi Arabia.
The surgery took place in 2010, and since then, the boy has shown marked results, having lost 52 pounds and gone down to a BMI of 24, according to CNN.
Click here to see a photo of the two-year-old boy before and after his surgery in 2010.
