Resumen

RODRIGUEZ- SABORIO, Luis Diego  y  VEGA- VEGA, Marlen. Cirugía bariátrica: Tratamiento de elección para la obesidad mórbida. Acta méd. costarric [online]. 2006, vol.48, n.4, pp.162-171. ISSN 0001-6002.

Obesity has become a very important health problem nowadays, given its high prevalence and its associated pathological conditions such as: type 2 diabetes mellitus, hypertension, dyslipidemia and joint disease. It is well known weight reduction produces an important improvement in all of these conditions. Although conservative therapy with diet and exercise is a fundamental part of the management of obesity, it has been observed that this treatment is unsatisfactory in morbidly obese patients (Body Mass Index > 35 Kg/m²). Actually, bariatric surgery is the only intervention that has been effective in producing weight loss and also an improvement on obesity co-morbidities. There are several kinds of procedures in bariatric surgery that can be classified according to the mechanism that they induce weight loss: malabsortive, restrictive or both. Even when all the procedures have yielded good results, the gold standard is the Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, because it combines both, restrictive and malabsortive components; in that way the gastric bypass induces effective weight loss and decreases the rate of diseases like type 2 diabetes and hypertension, without increasing the rate of complications.

Palabras clave : Bariatric surgery, obesity, gastric bypass, laparoscopy.