Obesity damage lingers

Patients who undergo weight-loss stomach surgery have a higher death rate than that of the general population, including more suicides, researchers said last week.

The higher risk of death generally is due not to the surgery itself but to the health problems that accompany obesity, and the damage that the condition does to the body before and after surgery, said the report, published in the October issue of Archives of Surgery.

In a review of more than 16,000 bariatric operations that were done in Pennsylvania over a nine-year period, researchers found 440 deaths among the patients, whose average age when the operations were performed was 48.

About 1% of the patients in the study died within a year of the procedures and 6% died within five years.

Heart disease was listed as the cause of death in 76 patients -- about 20% of the group -- a rate higher than would be common in the general population, the researchers found.

There were 14 suicides; a group that size in the general population would probably have two suicides.