Gastric bypass surgery: Dying to prevent cancer?
This whole bariatric surgery kick is getting out of hand. People looking for a quick fix think that it’ll be the easy out-and their surgeons are only too eager to put them under the knife. They promise them that the surgery will be the magic cure for everything from heart disease to diabetes. Now they’re even claiming it’ll reduce their risk of cancer. Give me a break.
According to a new study done by researchers at McGill University in Canada, gastric bypass surgery can reduce the risk of cancer by as much as 85 percent. Which is great as long as the surgery doesn’t kill you.
That’s right. The chilling statistic you never hear (except from me – I wrote about this in a Daily Dose a couple of years ago) is that as many as five percent of patients that undergo these procedures are dead within a year.
Think that sounds like a small percentage? Consider this: In 2007 alone, more than 205,000 people had gastric bypass surgery. That means about 10,250 of those people will die sometime this year.
The new study by the doctors at McGill compared 1,035 patients who had bariatric surgery between 1986 and 2002 with 5,746 obese patients who did not have the procedure. Over all, 2 percent of the gastric bypass patients were eventually diagnosed with cancer, while 8.5 percent of the non-surgery patients eventually developed cancer.
Interesting? Yes. In fact, the breakdown of cancer reduction found by the study was fascinating: the gastric bypass patients were found to have an 85 percent lower incidence of breast cancer and a 70 percent lower diagnoses of colon and pancreatic cancers. What’s more, there were 60 percent fewer incidences of skin cancers, a 15 percent drop in uterine cancers, and non-Hodgkins lymphomas dropped by half.
But before you get too excited, consider that there are serious problems with the methodology of this research.
Dr. Edward H. Phillips, a bariatric surgery specialist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said the results could be skewed because bariatric surgery candidates are screened for cancer before they can be eligible for the procedure. “It could be we are selecting people out of the population who don’t have cancer,” he said, also noting that the study only spanned five years, while cancers also take a long time to develop.
I worry that these findings will spur even more people to undergo this barbaric procedure. I think that many of my colleagues can’t see the forest through the trees. For the people who are getting this surgery, their morbid obesity is by far the biggest threat to their lives – cancer concerns are secondary to someone who tilts the scales at over 500 pounds. But the problem is that this surgery – once reserved for people with morbid obesity – is now being performed on people who are capable of losing weight on their own. And I mean people that are about 80 or so pounds overweight. And that’s where it gets dangerous.
After getting this surgery, patients are forced to eat so little that they can’t possibly get all the nutrients they need. So instead of getting all the protein they need from a big, juicy steak, or folate from chicken liver, they have to load up on supplements to avoid malnutrition.
The bottom line is that the danger to people who are obese is less about cancer and more about sugar. It’s gluttony, and/or a lack of education on what you should and should not put in your mouth. Before subjecting themselves to risky surgeries with endless post- operative complications, they should try steering clear of the refrigerator. But you won’t hear this from the members of the AABS there’s too much money at stake.
