Bariatric surgery patients have cancer rates similar to those of normal weight people

Jun 5, 2014 20:59 GMT  ·  By

A team of researchers have found that, apart from making it possible for people who are classified as morbidly obese to lose significant amounts of weight, bariatric surgery helps reduce cancer risk.

Thus, evidence at hand indicates that, following their undergoing weight loss surgery, morbidly obese people eventually come to have a cancer risk similar to that documented in the case of individuals of a normal weight.

“Bariatric surgery is associated with reduced cancer risk in morbidly obese people,” says specialist Daniela Casagrande with the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.

In a paper published in Springer’s journal Obesity Surgery, Daniela Casagrande and fellow researchers explain that their claim that bariatric surgery helps cut cancer risk is based on information obtained while reviewing 13 studies on the issue.

All in all, the specialists looked at the medical records of 54,257 people and found that the incidence of cancer in patients who underwent bariatric surgery was one of 1.06 cases per 1,000 person-years.

In the case of obese people, on the other hand, cancer incidence has been shown to be one of 2.12 cases per 1,000 person-years. Hence, it has been concluded that bariatric surgery does help reduce cancer risk.

For the time being, researchers Daniela Casagrande and her colleagues are unable to say why it is that people who undergo weight loss surgery experience a drop in their cancer risk. However, they suspect that several factors might be at play.

They say that, first off, it could be that bariatric surgery and its subsequent weight loss foster metabolic changes that somehow make a person less vulnerable to said medical condition and therefore reduce cancer incidence among formerly obese individuals.

Then again, it is also possible that the weight loss triggered by the bariatric surgery makes it easier to diagnose cancer while it is still in its early stage, and it even improves cancer treatment outcome.

For those unaware, bariatric surgery is gradually becoming the preferred method to treat morbid obesity. Such interventions boil down to reducing the size of a person's stomach to a small pouch which is then connected to the small intestine.

Interestingly enough, it was in early May that researchers made a case of how, by reducing fat deposits and inflammation, weight loss surgery could also help treat nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

“Our findings suggest that providers should consider bariatric surgery as the treatment of choice for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in severely obese patients,” Dr. Michel Murr with University of South Florida-Tampa in the United States argued at that time.