Gastric Bypass Seems Risky After Failed Gastric Banding

Seems?

Compared to primary gastric bypass surgery, rescue procedures after failed gastric banding have much higher risks of adverse outcomes.

As Dr. Urich Guller told Reuters Health by email, these patients "have significantly more intraoperative complications, postoperative complications, a higher risk of reoperations, an increased length of hospital stay and higher hospital charges compared to patients undergoing primary gastric bypass."

"These differences," he added, "were not only statistically significant but also of great clinical relevance."

"The use of gastric banding to treat obesity has increased drastically in the United States. However, the frequency of reoperations related to gastric banding and associated short-term outcomes are unknown," Dr. Guller, of the University of Berne, Switzerland and colleagues wrote in the introduction to their September 24th online paper in the Annals of Surgery.

To gain further information, the researchers, including Dr. Mathias Worni of Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, examined US data on 63,171 patients who underwent a primary gastric bypass procedure and 3,132 (4.7%) who underwent a gastric band-related reoperation. The number of gastric band-related reoperations almost doubled, going from 579 in 2005 to 1,132 in 2008.

Is.