Bariatric surgery increases life expectancy in large Swedish study

Reuters Health - 15/10/2020 - Bariatric surgery gives severely-obese patients an average of three extra years of life, although the operation does not bring the risk of early death down to the same rate as the general population, according to a large analysis of patients in Sweden. The non-randomized study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, followed 5,182 middle-age people over a median of 24 years. The adjusted median life expectancy among the 2,007 volunteers who had received the surgery was 3.0 years longer than for the 2,040 patients who had received standard non-surgical obesity care. The 1,135 people in a random sampling of the general population lived 8.5 years longer than the usual care group. "Now, for the first time, we've got a measure of how much bariatric surgery prolongs life expectancy for the average patient," chief author Dr. Lena Carlsson of the University of Gothenburg told Reuters Health in an email. "One impo...

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Posted on 15 October, 202022 October, 2020