Gastric Bypass

Gastric Bypass surgery makes a person's stomach smaller and permits food to bypass a portion of the small intestine. As a result, your stomach will feel full much quicker than when your stomach had its normal size, which lessens your food intake and also the calories consumed. This leads to weight loss.

The procedure does require stapling a portion of the stomach. The most common type of gastric bypass surgery is the Roux-en-Y gastric bypass.

ROUX-EN-Y GASTRIC BYPASS

The Roux-en-Y gastric bypass procedure, the stomach is made smaller by making a small pouch in the upper part of the stomach by stapling it together or through vertical banding. The small part of the stomach is joined to the center part of the small intestine (jejunum), bypassing the rest of the stomach and the upper part of the small intestine (duodenum). The procedure is completed using a laparoscope (a thin telescope for viewing inside the abdomen) in most patients. The surgery shows minor scarring when carried out using this method.

The Gastric Bypass surgical operation reduces the somach size by to 1-2 ounces .

Benefits of Gastric Bypass

Some excerpts from a Chicago study in January 2008 prove Gastric Bypass surgery's value.

"It's the best therapy for diabetes that we have today, and it's very low risk," said the study's lead author, Dr. John Dixon of Monash University Medical School in Melbourne, Australia.

The patients had stomach band surgery, a procedure more common in Australia than in the United States, where gastric bypass surgery, or stomach stapling, predominates.

Gastric bypass is even more effective against diabetes, achieving remission in a matter of days or a month, said Dr. David Cummings, who wrote an accompanying editorial in the journal but was not involved in the study.

"We have traditionally considered diabetes to be a chronic, progressive disease," said Cummings of the University of Washington in Seattle. "But these operations really do represent a realistic hope for curing most patients."