02/03/2025
Great article recently from American Medical Association.
"only about 1% of those eligible to undergo surgical treatment for obesity receive it"
"Bariatric surgery has been shown to be the most effective and longest-lasting treatment for severe obesity.
According to a study presented at the ASMBS’ annual scientific meeting last year, surgery provides more significant, sustained weight loss than GLP-1 drugs. In the systematic review of 4 years of clinical data from thousands of patients, researchers found that bariatric procedures demonstrated an average total weight loss of about 30% a year after the surgery. Up to a decade later, patients weighed a quarter less on average than they did before their operation. Following about 18 months of weekly injections of the GLP-1 drug semaglutide, patients peaked at nearly 15% weight loss while those receiving tirzepatide plateaued at about 22%. Kashyap noted those benefits were achieved with the highest doses and that once treatment stopped, half the lost weight returned within a year.
“Obesity is a chronic disease, so weight regain is definitely plausible with both, but there’s greater relapse with pharmacological therapy than with surgery,” she said."
This Medical News article discusses how the popularity of the antiobesity drugs semaglutide and tirzepatide may affect uptake of bariatric surgery.
