A study led by researcher Junaid Bhatti, PhD, at Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, examined 8,814 patients with 81 percent being women. The study revealed startling results, stating that hospital visits due to self-harm increased from 2.33% in each patient to 3.63% after gastric bypass surgery.
In terms of age, patients admitted to the hospital most often were 35 years and older, resided in rural areas, and earned a low income. The authors published their findings in JAMA Surgery. The study provides people with an insight to suicide-related deaths and its relation to gastric bypass surgery. The study also uncovered that suicide rates amongst patients who have undergone gastric bypass surgery is four times higher than the general population.
In an accompanying paper, Carol Lindsay-Westphal, PhD, and Amir Ghaferi, MD, from the University of Michigan wrote, “Bariatric surgery is more than just an operation — it is time we recognize and treat it is as such.”
The results derived from the study stated, out of the 111 gastric bypass patients examined, hospitals treated at least one of them for a self-harm injury after or before the surgery. Furthermore, hospitals received 11 patients both after and before surgery, 37 came before surgery, and 63 came after surgery.
On another surprising note, the study revealed that 93.0 percent of patients admitted to the hospital suffered from a mental illness, which doctors diagnosed them within five years before the weight loss surgery took place. The chosen method of attempted suicide by most patients was premeditated overdose with self-hanging coming in second with 20.9% patients choosing this method.
The patients selected for the study all resided in Ontario, Canada and were 18 to 65 of age. In order to get conclusive results, researchers compared the frequency of self-harm injuries three years before and after weight loss surgery. The participants underwent gastric bypass surgery from April 2006 to March 2011. The researchers collected their data from the hospitals that treated their self-harm injuries. Craig Primack, MD, working at the Scottsdale Weight Loss Center in Arizona, wrote to MedPage Today, saying that people should not consider gastric bypass surgery as the definitive cure, but as a treatment.
In his e-mail, he also touched upon people’s perception of how losing weight will make every other problem in their life disappear. When the problems, stemming from a broken marriage, joblessness, no social circle, etc. still occur, it leads to suicide attempts. “When they get to that number (or close to it) and realize that they will not achieve the thing they thought their weight would fix, they […] have to face the fact that […] they are […] still single, still have a bad job, etc.”
The researchers concluded that the study imposed many limitations, as the data collected did not consider other factors such as the increase of stress after surgery and the inability to lose weight. Moreover, their data did not take in account Canadians who received their weight loss surgery in another Canadian province.
In addition, the ICD-10 codes can be misleading, as the reason for intoxication and substance abuse is unclear. Lastly, the researchers’ calculation of suicide attempts may have undervalued the actual statistic of suicide rates and the deaths followed by the attempt in the emergency room.
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