Obese individuals who undergo bariatric surgery tend to live longer than those who don't.
New research suggests these patients have a 53 percent reduced risk of dying from any cause between five and 13 years after the procedure, the Group Health Research Institute reported.
"We expanded what we've been learning and showed that older men in this study do just as well after bariatric surgery as younger women in previous studies have done," said David Arterburn, a Group Health physician and a Group Health Research Institute.
To make their findings the researchers looked at 2,500 obese patients and almost 7,500 matched controls. Past studies have looked at the health influences of bariatric surgery on younger women, but this investigation focused on a population that had a mean age of 52 and was 74 percent males.
"We also found evidence that bariatric surgery has become safer," said Matthew Maciejewski, PhD, a research career scientist in Health Services Research and Development at the Durham VA and a professor of general internal medicine at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, N.C. "We found that the risk of dying during and soon after bariatric surgery was lower in 2006 [to] 2011 than in 2000 [to] 2005."
Obesity rates in the U.S. have been on the rise, and so has bariatric surgery. Understanding the surgery's long-term health outcomes could help doctors give better surgery advice to their patients. In the future, the researchers plan to look at other factors such as whether or not bariatric surgery changes the course of diabetes and other associated diseases and if healthcare costs are reduced in the long-term.
"Our results may have broader implications for encouraging weight loss in general," Arterburn said. "Despite the studies showing that patients with lower BMIs live longer, not much evidence has linked intentional weight loss (from surgery, medication, or diet and exercise) with longer survival. But our results, combined with other studies of bariatric surgery, may help to make that case."
The finding was published in a recent edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
