ABSTRACT
Bariatric surgery is increasingly regarded as a treatment of morbidly obese patients who fail on medical and/or behavioral weight reduction therapies and/or, particularly, have serious comorbidities. In 1991, the National Institutes of Health Consensus Conference made a recommendation for surgery in patients having a body mass index (BMI) >40 kg/m2 and exhibiting a strong desire for substantial weight loss to improve quality of life, or a BMI >35 kg/m2 plus serious comorbidities [1]. More recently, the delegates from the Diabetes Surgery Summit recognized the legitimacy of surgical approaches to treat type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) among comorbidities even in patients with a BMI ≥30 kg/m2, but carefully selected [2]. Indeed, bariatric surgery is emerging as a valuable therapeutic approach for T2DM and much effort has been devoted to understand the mechanisms of diabetes resolution. Nevertheless, bariatric surgery can be curative of most of the other comorbidities, which accompany obesity such as hypertension, dyslipidemia, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), sleep apnea, obesity-hypoventilation syndrome, cardiac dysfunction, reˆux esophagitis, arthritis, infertility, stress incontinence, and venous stasis ulcers.
