Does surgically induced weight loss decrease mortality?
Blandine Laferrère
Correspondence Obesity Research Center, St Luke's Roosevelt Hospital Center, Room 1034, 1111 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10025, USA
Email bbl14@columbia.edu
This article has no abstract so we have provided the first paragraph of the full text.
In the past 20 years, the prevalence of obesity in the US has more than doubled in adults and tripled in children. Obese individuals have increased rates of diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease and cancer, which in turn leads to increased mortality. The risk of death among individuals with a BMI 
40 kg/m2 is double that of those individuals who are not overweight.1 Weight loss induced by diet or surgery improves comorbidities and reduces the incidence of new cases of diabetes mellitus.2 Nonetheless, data on the effect of weight loss on mortality have been inconclusive due, in part, to the inability to separate intentional from unintentional weight loss.3 Although previously suggested by Adams et al.,4 the prospective study by Sjöström et al. provides the missing piece of the puzzle by showing that intentional weight loss after bariatric surgery decreases mortality more than conventional weight-loss therapy does.
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