by Maureen Salamon
. Health reporter
Best Weight Loss Medicines - Weight-Loss Surgery May Lower Some Pregnancy Complications, Raise Others
Wednesday, (Health News) - After submitting weight loss surgery, women are significantly less prone to diabetes during pregnancy, but twice as likely to offer smaller babies How normal, a new study suggests.
Swedish scientists have found that weight loss (or "bariatric") surgery before pregnancy decreases the chances of certain complications for mothers and babies, but raises chances to others. They recommended any pregnancy after weight loss surgery to be considered high risk and receive more rigorous monitoring."The number of women who are obese in early pregnancy has increased dramatically in the last few decades," said the author of the Kari Johansson study, a postdoctoral researcher and nutritionist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. "Consequently, there was a dramatic increase in the number of women who become pregnant after bariatric surgery," she added.
"The positive effects of bariatric surgery in health outcomes - such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease - are reasonably well studied, but less is known about the effects on pregnancy and [post-delivery] results," he pointed out Johansson. .
The study was published on-line February 26 at the New England Journal of Medicine.
U.S. The health authorities say that more than one third of the American adults are obese, with a body mass index (BMI, a weight calculation of height) of 30 or higher.
Nearly 179,000 obese people were submitted to weight loss surgery in the United States in 2013, according to the American society of metabolic and bariatric surgery. While several techniques can be used, surgery restricts the amount of foods that the stomach can contain and / or reduces the absorption of the calorie intestines and food nutrients.Johansson and his colleagues used data from the national Swedish health records to compare the pregnancies between almost 600 women who gave birth after bariatric surgery and more than 2,300 women who did not have surgery, but they had the same BMI.
Only 2% of women who had weight loss surgery developed gestational diabetes, compared to 7% of the other group, the researchers said. The surgical group was also much less likely to give rise to bigger babies than normal.
However, the weight loss surgery group was twice as likely to give birth to small babies for gestational age, and their pregnancies were also duration slightly shorter. In addition, the surgical group experienced a slight collision in the rate of decks, the study found.
The researchers did not examine what could have caused smaller babies between the recipients of bariatric surgery, or higher Natbro. But Johannson said that these results can be due to the reduction of nutrient absorption resulting from surgery, with a fetus that does not receive enough nutrition.
"It was reported that the gastric bypass [a form of bariatric surgery] increases the risk of protein, iron, vitamin B12, vitamin D and calcium deficiencies," she said. "In addition, many women in our study may have continued to lose weight when they were pregnant. Continued weight loss can affect fetal nutrition and could influence growth."
Because obesity is linked to poor outcomes for expectant mothers and babies - including congenital defects, gestational diabetes, high pressure, premature birth and even childhood obesity - efforts to lose weight before pregnancy are important, Dr. Aaron said Caughey, president of the obstetrics and gynecology department of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Health and University of Sciences.
but Caughty, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new research, said women considering weight loss surgery should make the decision based on the long-term health benefits of the procedure - not in potential benefits related to pregnancy .
"I do not think pregnancy should be the thing that scale tips," Cavay said. "I do not think the evidence of this study is enough to say now that you should absolutely get this surgery so you have a better result of pregnancy."
Chaughy agreed with researchers that any pregnancy occurring after weight loss surgery deserves a higher level of monitoring and should be considered high risk.
It also noted that some experts advise women who suffer weight loss surgery before pregnancy to delay conceive up to 12 to 24 months after the procedure, the period in which faster weight loss occurs.
"I think a conversation with someone who takes care of complicated pregnancies, a maternal-fetal medical doctor, is a good idea," Cavay said.
