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 […]
May 4, 2024 — Every day is a day to learn something new. So yesterday we learned that our gut has a mind of its own – the enteric nervous system. Randy Seeley presented his work on this at the Columbia Cornell Obesity Medicine course. It seems that much of the progress in obesity treatment over the last few […]
April 16, 2024 — Right now GLP-1 medicines for obesity carry high list prices that engender great debates about how many billions (hyperbolists will say trillions) of dollars treating obesity will cost healthcare systems. For the uninitiated, it’s quite natural to think of metabolic procedures and obesity medicine in terms of either/or questions. No matter that this is a […]
April 6, 2024 — Sleep apnea is a complication of obesity and at the same time, obesity can be a complication of sleep apnea. This two-way relationship sets up a problem that is serious and can be hard to resolve. But it deserves close attention because it can lead to an early death. So, given the tangled relationship between […]
February 8, 2024 — This is not exactly startling news. But two new studies this week do offer a very clear confirmation of one of the important benefits that comes from treating obesity – unmistakably better control of hypertension. One reason this is important is the substantial amount of disinformation that circulates to suggest obesity is not a real […]
