No long-term cost savings with weight loss surgery, study finds

Weight loss surgery does not lower health costs over the long run for people, according to a US study that challenges the idea that the costs of such surgery pay off later on in fewer medications and less care for people who have lost weight.

“We need to view this as the serious, expensive surgery that it is,” said study leader Jonathan Weiner from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. “That for some people can almost save their lives, but for others is a more complex decision.”

According to the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, about 200,000 people have weight loss surgery every year.

It is typically recommended for people with a body mass index (BMI) - a measure of weight in relation to height - of at least 40, or at least 35 if they also have health problems such as diabetes or severe sleep apnea.

For the study, Weiner and his colleagues tracked health insurance claims for almost 30,000 people who underwent weight loss surgery between 2002 and 2008. They compared those with claims from an equal number of obese people who had a similar set of health problems but didn’t get surgery.

As expected, the surgery group had a higher up-front cost of care, with the average procedure running about US$29,500.

In each of the six years after that, health care costs were either the same among people who had or hadn’t had surgery, or slightly higher in the bariatric surgery group, according to findings published in JAMA Surgery.