Doctors have said that in the coming years, the surgery done to counter obesity in which the stomach is stapled to reduce its size, may be possible without making any incisions. The surgery may be done by only using a long tube which will be inserted through the mouth and guided down to the stomach. This will make the surgical procedure a far lower risk and also at lower costs, thus paving the way for more patients to undertake the surgery.
This option cannot come soon enough as approximately one third of the United States adult population comes under the obese category. Obesity carries with itself a lot of health risks. It has been associated with huge increase in chronic medical conditions like heart disease, diabetes, some kinds of cancer, arthritis, high blood pressure and other health complications. One way to measure obesity is by using a mathematical formula using a person's weight and height.
This is called the body mass index or BMI in which weight in kilograms is divided by height in meters squared. A BMI of 30 or more is classified as obese and a BMI of 40 or more indicates morbid obesity.
For people who are severely obese, an option to treat obesity is surgery and the term used to indicate operations to treat obesity is bariatric surgery. There are two most common types of bariatric surgical procedures – one is gastric bypass and the other is gastric banding. There is also stomach stapling in which the upper stomach is stapled, so its size becomes smaller and consecutively the person feels full after eating only a less amount of food.
Dr. Philip Schauer, M.D., Head of Bariatric Surgery Program at the Cleveland Clinic said: “I believe we are perhaps on the verge of another revolution.” In NOTE (Natural orifice transendoscopic surgery), instruments similar to long tubes and having robotic arms along with staple guns could be inserted through the mouth.
He also suggested another possibility of inserting a tube in the intestines which would obstruct the absorption of calories. He said these procedures were around 5 to 10 years away and also suggested that using the mouth or rectum which is a natural orifice would further lower costs, since it meant that the procedure could be performed without anesthesia, also making it less risky. He added: “Gaining access to the organ you want to work on is half the trauma. If there's less risk, maybe we could do (bariatric surgery) on patients with a lower BMI, maybe under 35, as a preventive operation.”
Surgery for obesity can cost as much as $25,000, more in some cases. Costs can further increase to treat for any complications which may occur post the surgery. This is proving a deterrent for employers in the United States, many of whom have not given obesity surgery coverage to their employees, even though U.S. Medicare has given its approval for the procedure for people who are extremely obese, and provide reimbursement of the cost of surgery.
Dr. Philip Schauer said: "It's a huge problem - employers are not paying. We had expected many other third-party payers to follow Medicare." He also added that several studies had indicated that the cost of the surgery paid for itself in a period from three and a half up to five years because of the cost saved from hospitals visits, prescriptions etc. A new, cheap obesity surgery procedure will make surgery a more viable option for many obesity sufferers.
