Weight-loss surgery bodes well for pregnancy

Women in their child-bearing years have increasingly turned to bariatric surgery to lose weight, but without much information on how such surgical procedures might affect fertility or pregnancy.

Now researchers have found that obese women who undergo weight-loss surgery before becoming pregnant are less likely to have pregnancy-related health problems, such as gestational diabetes and high blood pressure, than obese women who don't have the surgery. In fact, their rates of such problems are almost as low as those of women who have never been obese.

Further, women who have a weight-loss operation are less likely to have babies that are born prematurely or are born overweight or underweight.

In a report published Nov. 19 in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., researchers at Rand, UCLA, the Greater Los Angeles VA Health Care System and elsewhere analyzed 75 health-related studies of women who had undergone bariatric surgery.

Among the findings:

* Nutritional deficiencies during pregnancy are rare after two types of weight-loss surgery, specifically gastric bypass and gastric banding. They're more common in women who have biliopancreatic diversion. (WebMD offers an overview of such procedures, their risks, their benefits and related information.)

* Fertility rates might improve after weight-loss surgery, but then, they improve after nonsurgical weight loss as well.

* Surgery-related complications, such as internal hernia, can occur during pregnancy, but they're rare.

More research is needed, but overall the findings bode well for women who want to undergo dramatic weight loss and to have children.

To put these findings in more context, the researchers note that bariatric surgery increased 800% from 1998 to 2005. Between 2003 and 2005 alone, women ages 18 to 45 made up almost half (49%) of all inpatient bariatric surgery patients.

Many obese women are obviously interested the procedures. Now they just need as much information as possible.

-- Tami Dennis

Photo credit: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times

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