Obesity surgery can lead to nerve damage- study

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Obesity Surgery Can Lead to Nerve Damage - Study

Thu Oct 14, 3:39 PM ET

 Health - Reuters

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Operations to treat obesity such as stomach-stapling may

work

a little too well, causing some patients to develop nerve damage -- a symptom of

malnutrition, doctors warned Thursday.

People who get these kinds of procedures may need to take vitamins and get

regular

checks from specialists, the researchers said.

They found a significant number of patients who got gastric bypass surgery or

other

operations to limit how much they could eat later developed signs of nerve

damage called

peripheral neuropathy.

Malnutrition appeared to be the culprit, Dr. Dyck told a science briefing

sponsored

by the American Medical Association.

" We found that nutritional factors were the main risk factors, " Dyck, a

professor of

neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, told the briefing.

" Patients who developed peripheral neuropathy lost more weight ... and they lost

weight at

a much faster rate. "

The patients who developed the nervous system symptoms also tended to have more

nausea, diarrhea as well as a symptom called dumping, in which food goes

undigested

from the stomach to the intestine.

PERMANENT DISABILITY

All these can cause poor absorption of vitamins from food, Dyck said. Neuropathy

can be

caused by a lack of vitamin B-12 and can lead to permanent disability, with

patients

sometimes forced to use wheelchairs.

Symptoms include tingling, numbness and sometimes stabbing pain.

" It can be a sharp pain like somebody sticking you with a knife, " Dyck said. " Or

your

husband or wife caresses you and instead of it being a pleasant sensation, it

hurts like the

dickens. Sometimes people walk around naked (because) their clothing hurts

them. "

For the study, published in this week's issue of the journal Neurology, Dyck and

colleagues

looked at the records of 435 patients who got obesity surgery, either at the

Mayo Clinic or

who later came to the clinic for follow-up treatment.

Dyck stressed that his study did not look at a representative sample of people

getting such

surgery. But in his case 71 patients, or 16 percent, developed peripheral

neuropathy after

surgery.

As a comparison, Dyck's team studied obese patients getting gallbladder surgery.

Just 3

percent of them got symptoms of peripheral neuropathy.

An estimated 30 percent of Americans are clinically obese, meaning they are more

than 20

percent above a healthy body weight. They develop diabetes, heart disease and

some

forms of cancer at a much higher rate than slimmer people.

Last year more than 100,000 people opted for surgery to treat obesity, usually

involving

an operation to bypass the stomach or make it smaller.

A report published in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association

(news - web

sites) found the surgery works well and often helps people lose 100 pounds or

more.

The operations cured diabetes in 76 percent of the patients, high blood

cholesterol

problems were resolved or improved in 86 percent, high blood pressure was

corrected in

61 percent and obstructive sleep apnea was resolved or improved in 83 percent.