April 16, 2025 — Back in October, JAMA Network Open published a research letter suggesting that metabolic surgery numbers were “plunging” because of GLP-1 medicines. They claimed to observe a 26% drop in surgeries between 2022 and 2023 for privately insured patients. A few months later, the authors issued a correction and said the actual drop was more like […]
March 29, 2025 — These are indeed interesting times for folks who care about the need that so many people have for obesity care. Medicines for obesity, with the advent of GLP-1 agonists, have become much better. Thus the demand for metabolic surgery has slipped a bit. Most metabolic surgeons have seen this in the volume of cases that […]
February 21, 2025 — Very quietly this week, JAMA Surgery published new data on long-term outcomes that will inform choices in metabolic surgery for years to come. We’re talking about the study of 10-year outcomes from the SM-BOSS RCT of gastric sleeve versus bypass. It tells us that the easy choice in the short term (a gastric sleeve) might […]
January 27, 2025 — A new paper this morning in Nature Medicine tells us that interrupting liver disease in obesity is possible with metabolic surgery. More specifically, in an observational study of patients with obesity and cirrhosis due to MASH, Ali Aminian and colleagues found a 72% lower risk of major complications from liver disease in patients who received […]
October 31, 2024 — The eternal question about medical and surgical treatment for obesity in young persons is all about long-term outcomes. Will the net effect of highly effective treatment actually be to make their lives better? An impressive new analysis of ten-year outcomes for metabolic surgery in teens offers excellent insight. A Landmark Publication The Teen-LABS (Longitudinal Assessment […]
October 28, 2024 — “Our results provide a national contemporaneous estimate of the decline in metabolic bariatric surgery associated with the era of GLP-1 RAs.” Writing in JAMA Network Open last week, Kevin Lin, Ateev Mehrotra, and Thomas Tsai say rates of metabolic surgery dropped 26% in 2023 as use of GLP-1 medicines for obesity more than doubled. Nonetheless, […]
July 18, 2024 — The excitement of the moment we are in for obesity care can make it hard to step back and take a long view. But a new study in the International Journal of Obesity offers a good reminder about the importance of doing just that. Hanna Konttinen and colleagues offer us a good, objective view of […]
July 7, 2024 — Letting go is hard. But there is a bright line between persistence and stubbornness. Persistence is absolutely necessary to advance a cause. But persistence gives way to stubbornness when facts line up to define serious limitations and people press on with a futile effort. Such is the case with the DiRECT obsession for “curing” type […]
June 17, 2024 — The annual meeting of the ASMBS wrapped up last week in San Diego after producing a steady flow of new insights and headlines. Robotic surgery, long-term outcomes, and diabetes prevention figured prominently in the news. But one of the less enlightening threads of news from the meeting was a horse-race narrative about metabolic surgery versus […]
June 3, 2024 — The STOP Obesity Alliance released new data Friday from an exhaustive analysis of access to obesity medicines in Medicaid programs across the United States. It’s not a pretty picture. It gives us more data to show how we are marginalizing people with the greatest need for obesity care. No state fully covered all forms of […]
