Gastric Bypass in Mexico

Posted by Jose A. Castaneda on July 24, 2013

Gastric bypass surgery treats morbid obesity. The term morbid obesity means severe accumulation of excess weight as fatty tissue and it also includes health problems (comorbidities) it causes. Patients from countries such as the USA, Canada or UK travel the distance for a gastric bypass in Mexico, prices are very competitive and surgeons are highly trained and meet the highest international healthcare standards.

Bariatric surgery is the term encompassing all of the surgical treatments for morbid obesity, not just gastric bypasses, which make up only one class of such operations. Other surgeries include gastric band or lap band surgery, duodenal switch or gastrectomy sleeve.

What is Gastric Bypass Surgery?

It first divides the stomach into a small upper pouch and a much larger, lower pouch. This procedure then re-arranges the small intestine to allow both pouches to stay connected to it.

Weight loss surgeons have developed several different ways to reconnect the intestine, thus leading to several different names for bypass surgeries. Any gastric bypass leads to a marked reduction in the functional volume of the stomach, which also causes an altered physiological and psychological response to food.

This results in weight loss, typically dramatic, and also markedly reduces comorbidities. However, complications may be common in this type of surgery, consult Dr Castaneda for more detailed information as every patient and every case is unique.

The gastric bypass reduces the size of the stomach by well over 90%. Your normal stomach can stretch, sometimes to over 1000 ml, while the pouch of the gastric bypass may be just 15 ml in size.

Gastric bypass forms a pouch from the part of the stomach which is least susceptible to stretching. Its small original size prevents any significant long-term change in pouch volume. What does change, over time, is the size of the connection between stomach and bowel.

As the time progresses, the functional capacity of the pouch increases. By that time, weight loss has occurred, and the increased capacity serves to allow maintenance of a lower body weight.

The mechanism of weight loss is worth mentioning. When you ingest just a small amount of food, the first response is a stretching of the wall of the stomach pouch, which stimulates nerves which tell the brain that the stomach is full. The patient feels a sensation of fullness and satiety, as if they had just eaten a large meal. But in reality, you have eaten just a small amount of food.

Most people do not stop eating even in response to a feeling of fullness, but the patient rapidly learns that subsequent bites must be eaten very slowly and carefully, to avoid increasing discomfort, or even vomiting.

The stomach is connected to first part of small intestine, called as duodenum. Food is first churned in the stomach before passing into the small bowel. When the lumen of the small bowel comes into contact with nutrients in food, a number of hormones are released including cholecystikin (CCK) from the duodenum and PYY and GLP-1 from the ileum.

These hormones act by inhibiting further food intake and have thus been considered as satiety factors. ”Ghrelin”, is a hormone that is released in the stomach that stimulates hunger and food intake. Changes in circulating hormone levels after gastric bypass have been postulated to produce reductions in food intake and body weight in obese patients. However, these findings are still controversial, and the exact mechanisms by which gastric bypass surgery reduces food intake and body weight have yet to be determined.

To gain the maximum benefit from this physiology, it is important that you should eat only at mealtimes, 2 to 3 small meals daily. You should avoid snacks and grazing between meals, which can effectively cause weight loss. This requires a change in eating habits and behavior, and alteration of long-acquired habits for finding food.

Even if weight gain occurs late after surgery, capacity for a meal does not increase significantly. The cause of regaining weight is eating between meals, usually snack foods having high-caloric value.

Undergoing gastric bypass in Mexico will enhance your weight loss whilst saving you thousands of dollars in medical costs. Contact Dr Castaneda for a no-obligation consultation.