It's not just weight loss. It's health gain.

What do we mean by this?
Severe obesity or Morbid Obesity is a chronic disease that is associated with many health conditions such as heart disease and diabetes that contribute to a reduced life span. To put in bluntly – severe obesity kills. It kills as effectively as cancer! Next time you are in al old age home, look around and see how many morbidly obese people are present. Probably none, as most do not make it past their 60’s.

When you see the before and after results of some of our proud patients on this site, you see them smile and proudly display how well (and thin) they look. This thin appearance is “icing on the cake”. The real benefit is the cure or improvement is obesity associated health conditions (e..g. diabetes, sleep apnoea, high blood pressure, etc) and the reduction in the risk of death compared to being morbidly obese from 32-89% depending on the study.
Very few medical treatments (if any) come close to such permanent health benefits.

What is the scientific evidence for this?  Here are some of the key research papers that provide this evidence.

1. A special analysis (called a Meta-analysis) of 22,094 morbidly obese patients who had weight loss surgery was reported by Dr. Henry Buchwald and colleagues in 20041. Three operations were compared –restrictive (adjustable band and gastroplasty), combination (RY gastric bypass) and malabsorptive (biliopancreatic diversion with duodenal switch). Excess weight loss varied from 48% to 70%. In simpler terms, this means that if patients carried 100 extra pounds of weight, they lost 48 to 70 of these extra pounds and kept them off for the time of their follow-up. Diabetes was completely resolved in 77% of patients. Hyperlipidemia (increased lipids such as cholesterol) improved in 70% of patients. High blood pressure was cured in 62% of patients. Obstructive sleep apnoea was cured in 86% of patients.
2. We reported for the first time in 20042 that permanent weight loss through bariatric surgery reduced the risk of death by 89% compared to no surgery (and thus staying morbidly obese) in only 5 years of follow-up. We followed 1035 of our patients after bariatric surgery at the McGill University Health Center between 1986 and 2002. We compared their outcomes to a control group of 5746 who had no weight loss surgery over a 5-year period. Bariatric surgery resulted in 67% excess weight loss. Bariatric surgery patients had significant risk reductions for developing heart disease, cancer, diabetes, infectious, psychiatric, and mental disorders compared with controls.  The absolute mortality rate in the bariatric surgery patients was 0.7% compared with 6.2% in controls. Statistical analysis showed this to be equivalent to a reduction in the relative risk of death by 89% in patients with the surgery. This study raised a lot of interest throughout the world and in Canada (as an example look up CTV news in the Recent Media section).
3. The Swedish Obese Study3 is a longitudinal study of 2000 obese subjects treated with bariatric surgery or conventional medical means for more than 10 years. The no surgery controls lost or gained 3% weight over 15 years of follow up. Thee surgery group lost  30-40%% of their starting weight.  The relative risk of death was reduced in the surgical group by 32%.  The decreased mortality was due to reduction in deaths from heart attacks and from cancer.
4. A group from Monash University in Australia4 compared mortality data from patients who had weight loss surgery (laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding) with patients who received conventional medical treatment (no weight loss surgery).  Five deaths occurred in 6000 patient years in the surgical group, and 225 deaths occurred in 25,000 patient years in the no surgery group. This translated into a 73% reduction in the mortality rate (relative risk of death) in the surgically treated patients.
5. A collaborative research project conducted in Utah5 compared mortality in 8172 patients who had undergone gastric bypass surgery with the same number of community controls matched for age, sex, and body mass index. The gastric bypass patients had a 40% reduction in mortality, with reduction in deaths from heart attacks, diabetes and cancer.
6. Researchers from the University of Padova, Italy6, presented the long-term mortality of 821 obese patients who were treated with weight loss surgery (adjustable gastric band). These patients were compared with 821 age-, sex-, and body mass index-matched controls treated with conventional medical means (no weight loss surgery). A 62% reduction in mortality occurred in the surgery group (relative to the no surgery group) showing a significant survival advantage for the surgically treated subjects.
    

These studies complement those of Macdonald7 and Flum8 and confirm our findings which we reported in 2004.  

The above studies show clearly that weight loss through bariatric surgery saves lives.