Advances In Gastric Bypass

Will gastric bypass replace all other forms of obesity treatment?

Gastric bypass was what I call the second operation developed to do weight loss in patients who are massively overweight. The first was the intestinal bypass which was done in the '50s and turned out to have a lot of complications many years later. Every new procedure that comes out is measured against the gastric bypass, so in a way every procedure that comes out and fails is because the gastric bypass is shown to be better than it. If a new procedure, such as the sleeve gastrectomy which we talked about earlier, or any other new procedure, comes out that turns out to be better than the gastric bypass, but not higher complication rate, then that might surplant the gastric bypass.

What are some experimental gastric bypass procedures?

There are many surgeons changing little things that are going on with the gastric bypass, and some of the sleeve; the gastrorectomy which is now out. It was developed to decrease the complication rate from the gastric bypass to see how it would work. I think there are a lot of innovations that will come out in the next five to ten years having to do with that. Any one particular right now is the sleeve gastrorectomy, other than that, I don't know of any major change in the gastric bypass that's on the horizon.