Gastric Bypass Complications

What are the negative physical effects of gastric bypass?

The surgery itself has complications which lead to negative results which are, one, death; pulmonary emboli - which are blood clots going from your legs to your pelvis and up to your lungs, and people can die from that; wound infections, bleeding, needing blood transfusions; there's just a complication list we have for our patients of probably just about 100 different things that can occur immediately after the surgery and 30, 60 days after the surgery. Long term; skin problems for our patients are probably one of the biggest problems; they now have excess skin and what can they do? It means plastic surgery if they need that; I'd say about half the patients need plastic surgery and insurance companies usually will not cover it; that's a big question for the patient, how are they going to accomplish this in the future?

Does gastric bypass cause endocrine changes?

The endocrine changes in the gastric bypass are mostly diabetes, which is an endocrine problem, something with the pancreas and the cells that produce the insulin. When you do a gastric bypass you have interrupted some of those circuits that are going on in the body, and there's research going on for this now because no one knows exactly how that works, that improve the diabetic state. There are thyroid problems that incur, a lot of our patients have hypothyroidism and some of them, I don't know the percentage, get better and get off of their medication after the surgery. Those are the two major endocrine systems that are affected.

What is 'dumping syndrome'?

Dumping syndrome is caused by bypassing the stomach with the digestive process. What happens is food is, in medical terms, called very hyperosmolar. And osmolar means it's very dense, very concentrated. The stomach processes the food and brings it to a state of what we call isomolarity, which is it's equal in concentration to, essentially your blood and the fluids that are in your body. By bypassing your stomach, that food goes directly into your intestine and the intestines absorb water out of your body causing a syndrome. Which is you get dizzy because your blood volume has gone down, even though it's not bleeding, but it's the amount of volume that's there. And with that, the food passes very rapidly through your system and you develop diarrhea.

Can bypass surgery cause bowel obstruction?

Bypass surgery itself is not the cause of bowel obstructions, surgery is. What happens is, as the tissues and organs are manipulated during surgery the body reacts by causing fibrinous material or adhesions and those adhesions can wrap around or the bowel wrap around the adhesions of course the bowel to be constricted and that can cause an obstructions.

Will there be excess skin after bypass surgery?

There will be excess skin in most patients after bypass surgery or again any bariatric surgery. As you lose weight, your skin may or may not contract and this depends on how big you are to begin with. Your skin has elastic fibers in it and as the skin is stretched those elastic fibers can be broken. If they are broken, the skin will not shrink back down and then it has to be removed.