Gastric bypass

Managing obesity by surgical intervention

Morbid obesity is a chronic condition that is too hard to ease solely through diet and exercise. Even the existing medical treatments have a little or no success in reducing it.

Gastric bypass surgery, also called bariatric surgery, is an alternative choice for severely obese people who have unsuccessfully tried several conventional weight loss methods. It is, in fact, a treatment of last resort to lose weight. This surgery works by restricting the food intake or hampering the normal digestive process. It is of two types: Restrictive and Malabsorptive.

Promotion of Weight Loss by Bypass Surgery

During normal digestion, the food you eat moves along the digestive tract, that is, from mouth – esophagus – stomach - small intestine - large intestine - anus. As the food moves, digestive juices and enzymes mix with it at right places to digest the food and absorb the nutrients and calories it contains. The stomach and duodenum (the first part of the small intestine) are the main sites of digestion of food. Absorption of nutrients and calories begins in the duodenum and continues throughout the small intestine. When food reaches the large intestine, it mainly contains the indigestible portion (waste material), which is subsequently expelled as feces.

Gastric bypass surgery creates a new stomach, which is much smaller than a normal stomach to make the person feel full after eating a smaller portion of food. The surgery make the food bypass a part of the small intestine involved in absorption of nutrients and calories.

Gastric bypass surgeries confer weight loss; some patients can lose up to even 200 pounds weight. However, you should never consider these surgeries as a magic solution of obesity, nor are they for everybody. Just like other obesity treatments, you need to adopt strict dietary constraints and a regular exercise program after surgery for the rest of your entire life. These surgeries have many health risks and complications and are appropriate only for morbidly obese individuals.  Only obese individuals facing serious health risks from obesity that already outweigh the risks of surgery should consider this procedure. 

Types of Gastric Bypass Surgery

The gastric surgeries are of the following two types.

Restrictive surgery

The restrictive surgeries serve to restrict the intake of food without altering the digestive process. These surgeries create a small pouch (mini-stomach) in the upper-part of stomach with a narrow passage (to impede transit of food) into the rest of the portion of the stomach. As an outcome, the patient experiences a sensation of fullness after taking a small quantity of food so he eats less and consumes fewer calories. Two main restrictive surgeries include gastric banding and vertical banded gastroplasty.

Malabsorptive surgeries

The malabsorptive surgeries, as the name suggests, aim at hampering the nutrients absorbs. In this more complicated surgery, the surgeon connects the stomach directly to jejunum (the small intestine’s middle part) bypassing the duodenum and some of jejunum. Therefore, after this surgery the surface of the digestive tract involved in nutrients absorbing and calories reduces, which brings about the weight loss. Two main malabsorptive surgeries are roux-en-Y gastric bypass and biliopancreatic diversion.