Gastric Bypass in Teens Makes Kids Suffer from Defects

Investigators have recently established that teens who get a gastric bypass surgery, and then become pregnant, have a much higher chance of having babies who suffer from birth defects than their peers.

Though the correlation was only established in a small number of cases, experts believe that further investigations into this possible link are in order.

This is a very important finding, say scientists, given the rampant spread of obesity through the general population of the United States. Gastric bypass surgery is a popular methods of losing weight.

Basically, what this procedure entails is the stapling of the stomach, and a rearrangement of the guts inside the belly. The stomach is made smaller, so that people have to eat less food.

While this is indeed effective in lowering weight, it also creates difficulties for the human body to absorb vitamins and other nutrients from the food that is being ingested.

When it comes to a pregnancy, this can have very negative effects, the researchers behind the new study say. Fetuses need all the vitamins they can get from their mothers' bodies.

The reason why it's so dangerous for teens to have kids after such a surgery is that, unlike more mature women, the youngsters are much less likely to adhere to the strict rigors of diets.

As such, the brain and spinal cord of fetuses are severely affected, the study shows. Newborn infants have a high chance of suffering from a set of conditions called neural tube defects.

These are cases in which the kids are born paralyzed, due to malformations in their neural tubes. Vitamins such as folic acid, or folate, are of great importance in ensuring this doesn't happen during a normal pregnancy.

But gastric bypasses make folate intake difficult in the bodies of teen women, and so this is why their babies are more prone to suffering such drastic side-effects.

“Adolescents are known to have poor compliance, so they don’t do what they're told, with taking medication and doing what their parents say,” explains Dr Diana Farmer.\

“And therefore they may not take their right prenatal vitamins, their right supplementation,” adds the expert, who is a pediatric and fetal surgeon at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF).

She goes on say that the number of teens getting a gastric bypass has more than doubled over the past couple of years, which means that instances of cases where children are born with paralysis may become more common.

“If [teens] are going to do this operation, they have to be very carefully monitored and advised about this risk,” Farmer explained for MyHealthNewsDaily.