"Overnight" Weight Loss Surgery is Risky --- Can Cause Serious Injury and Death
if you are considering bariatric surgery, and the doctor tells you that he or she can do it on you as an outpatient, think very hard about getting a 2nd opinion. Leading doctors in the weight loss surgery community, as well as a new outcomes study, suggest that weight loss treatment as an outpatient can be risky and have an adverse impact on your safety.
In a study of nearly 52,000 patients undergoing gastric bypass, those who had the surgery performed as outpatients were 13 times more likely to die within 30 days and 12 times more likely to have serious complications than those who remained in the hospital for 2 days. The the national average for length of hospital stay for this surgery is 2 days.
How about an overnight stay? Do these patients fare better than those who opt for outpatient surgery? Not according to the study. Even patients who stayed overnight but were discharged less than 24 hours later were more likely to die than those who stayed 2 full days. These findings were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS) in Orlando, Florida just last week.
We'll talk about the reasons for higher mortality when weight loss surgery is performed on an outpatient basis in later blogs.