Heightened Suicide Risk After Weight-Loss Surgery

Wouldn't it be better just to lose the weight naturally - which you can?

Severely obese people who undergo weight-loss surgery may have a higher-than-average risk of suicide in the years following the procedure, a new study finds.

The report, published online September 14th in The American Journal of Medicine, adds to earlier evidence of this trend. But whereas most earlier studies came out of single institutions, the current one looked at data for all bariatric surgeries performed in the state of Pennsylvania over a 10-year period.

Among 16,683 patients who had bariatric surgery between 1995 and 2004, 31 had committed suicide by the end of 2006, the researchers found. The data translate into a suicide rate of nearly 14 per 10,000 men per year, and five per 10,000 women each year.

Those numbers are substantially higher than the suicide rates among Pennsylvanians in the same 35-to-64 age range, during the same period. Among all men in the state, the suicide rate in 2005 was 2.5 per 10,000, while the rate among women was 0.6 per 10,000.

Really.