Surgical treatment of severe obesity provides long-term wait loss and better quality of life compared with conventional treatment in primary health care. This is shown in a ten-year follow-up of the psychosocial component of the Swedish Obese Subjects project, SOS, at the Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg.
Thus far the follow-up comprises 1 276 subjects with severe obesity. Of these, 655 had been treated surgically and 621 had undergone treatment in primary care, following routines that usually include some form of dietary and exercise counseling.
“On average those who were operated on had lost about 28 kilograms (that is, about 25 percent) by the one-year check-up. After ten years the average weight loss was 16 percent in the group that had been treated surgically,” says Marianne Sullivan, who is directing the project about health-related quality of life and obesity treatment at the Section for Care Research, Sahlgrenska University Hospital.
“Despite a certain amount of regained weight after ten years, we can establish that only surgical intervention in cases of severe obesity provides long-lasting weight-loss results and therefore enhanced quality of life. In the conventionally treated group neither weight nor quality of life had changed after one year, and after ten years there was a 1.6 percent gain in weight.”
Among subjects who were operated on there was a dramatic increase in quality of life-the more weight loss, the better-and those who sustained a weight reduction of about 25 percent after ten years have achieved the same general sense of good health, emotional well-being, and psychosocial functionality as the population in general.