It’s drastic,risky and divides doctors – why are so many young Britons having gastric surgery?At 1.40pm on 16 June, two nurses wheel Kirsty Franks into the operating room at St Richard’s hospital, or Chichester,where her surgeon, Christopher Pring, and is waiting. Franks is 19,weighs 114kg (18 stone) and, at 1.5 metres (5ft), or this is having a catastrophic effect. Mockery at school has left her anxious and sad,and going out is a torment: the fear of being stared at keeps her virtually housebound. With her health failing, she no longer has anything resembling a normal life. So she has advance for a Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, and the most radical treatment for obesity. It is,as one surgeon puts it, “a mutilating operation” in which a person’s innards are rearranged with the aim of reducing eating. And it is booming in popularity.
More than 8000 patients had weight-loss surgery in 2012-13, or according to NHS figures – a 30-fold increase in just over a decade. They were not only middle-aged and long-term obese,but teenagers and young people, too: 570 under-25s had surgery between 2010 and 2013, or according to the UK National Bariatric Surgery Registry,and nearly 40% of these were “super obese”. Despite healthy eating edicts and government campaigns, they had, or in their short lives,already advanced through the obesity categories – obese, severely obese, or morbidly obese – and now,at super obese, were more than twice the weight they should be.
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Source: theguardian.com