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`Belly band’ surgery called reliable way to help obese kids
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Radical stomach-shrinking surgery safely helps obese teens drop an average 100 pounds and could soon be an option for the nation’s overstuffed kids, a landmark new study shows.
Gastric banding, known as a “lap band” or “belly band,” is performed on teens in only a handful of hospitals, but the study’s success means kids across the country soon could get skinnier with surgery.
“The band is going to be the way to go,” study co-author Dr. Evan Nadler, director of minimally invasive pediatric surgery at New York University School of Medicine said. “In our hands, the band is safe and effective for teenagers.”
The New York Daily News reported last month that the Food and Drug Administration is allowing three hospitals to try the operation on adolescents: NYU, the University of Illinois at Chicago and New York-Presbyterians’ Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, which already has opened a potentially lucrative weight-loss surgery center just for teens.
The FDA is still two to three years away from giving its okay for other hospitals to perform the surgery on the high school set.
Nadler and his colleagues tracked the progress of 53 of NYU’s teen patients and found the average patient’s weight plummeted from 297 pounds before surgery to 204 pounds a year later an average loss of 93 pounds of flab.
Lee Glover, 17, of Corona, Queens, N.Y., underwent a lap-band operation at NYU in early December and has already dropped about 65 pounds from his 400-pound body.
“I’m feeling fine. It’s going good so far,” he said. “I would recommend it to other people. It’s working for me.”
In the procedure, an adjustable band is tied around the top of the stomach to shrink how much food it can hold. It was approved for adult use in September 2001 but its use in teens remains controversial with critics calling it a copout for fat kids with poor lifestyle habits.
More than 30 percent of U.S. teens are overweight and 15 percent are obese.
Celeste Katz and Julian Kesner
New York Daily News