Originally published August 4 2005
Weight loss surgery complication emerges
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Doctors say a stomach-bypass procedure called the Roux-en-Y technique, in which a small pouch is stapled off from the rest of the stomach and connected directly to the small intestine, could possibly result in a complication in which the patient experiences dangerously low blood sugar, tunnel vision and blackouts.
At least six patients who underwent a popular type of obesity surgery have developed a complication --- perilously low blood sugar that causes confusion, tunnel vision and blackouts, doctors say.
The condition was corrected with further surgery and no lasting effects.
Researchers and other experts said the problem was probably too rare to warrant cutting back on the weight-loss procedure.
An upside: The problem might suggest new ways of treating diabetics.
"If we can understand the molecular details here, we can bottle them," said David Cummings, a hormone researcher at the University of Washington.
A small pouch is stapled off from the rest of the stomach and then connected directly to the small intestine.
This technique accounts for the vast majority of the roughly 140,000 gastric-bypass operations performed each year in the United States.
Researchers at the Mayo Clinic of Rochester, Minn., focused on six Roux-en-Y patients who developed severe low blood sugar, or neuroglycopenia.
"For people who have it, they basically have to be baby-sat: They cannot be left alone, they can't drive," said one of the researchers, F. John Service.
The researchers suspect the effect happens like this: Barely digested food rushes right into the intestine.
Its hormones then overstimulate the insulin-oozing beta cells of the pancreas.
The excess of insulin --- the same hormone that fails in diabetics --- removes too much sugar from the blood.
To correct the condition, doctors had to remove most of the pancreas from the patients.
But that put the patients in danger of developing diabetes.
Neil Hutcher, a stomach-bypass surgeon who is president of the American Society for Bariatric Surgery, said he had never seen the possible complication in his roughly 3,000 operations.
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