Men who undergo bariatric surgery are five times as likely to die within 30-days of the procedure compared to women, and their long-term mortality is almost three times higher, according to the outcomes from analysis of Austrian data with ten-year follow-up.
The findings, 'Sex-specific differences in patients deceased after bariatric surgery:
a retrospective, registry analysis', presented at Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD), indicate that men tend to be older and have higher rates of comorbidities such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes at the time of surgery, highlighting a pressing need to educate men about the importance of treating obesity earlier, before they develop potentially life-threatening comorbidities. Despite similar rates of obesity among men and women, over 70% of patients undergoing bariatric surgery are women.
"Surgical procedures are some of the most successful ways to help people with extreme obesity to lose weight, but they can come with complications," explained lead author, Dr Hannes Beiglböck from the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. "Although the absolute risk of dying after bariatric surgery is low, the findings of our large nationwide study highlight a substantially increased mortality risk among men compared to women. Women seem more willing to look at surgical weight loss earlier in life, whereas men tend to wait until they have more comorbidities."
To understand this gender disparity, it is important to determine whether mortality after bariatric surgery differ between men and women, as this may be a potential barrier to providing weight-loss surgery to men.
To find out more, researchers retrospectively analysed medical health claim data from the Austrian state insurance (the Österreichische Gesundheitskasse) that covers around 98% of the population (around nine million Austrians in 2018). In total, 19,901 patients (14,681 women, average age 41 years; 5,220 men, average age 42 years) who had undergone bariatric surgery (ie, sleeve gastrectomy, gastric bypass, biliopancreatic diversion or gastric banding) between January 2010 and December 2018 were included in the analyses and followed for an average of five years (107,806 patient years of observation). Researchers analysed sex-specific differences in comorbidities associated with obesity (ie, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, psychiatric disorders, and cancers) in patients who died.
Between January 2010 and April 2020, less than 2% (367/19,901; 176 men and 191 women) of bariatric surgery patients died. Nevertheless, overall postoperative mortality rates (per year of observation) were almost three times higher among men than women (0.64% vs 0.24%). Although deaths were rare in absolute terms; whilst 30-day mortality was five-fold higher in men compared to women (25 deaths, 0.5% vs 12 deaths, 0.1%).
Among those who died, cardiovascular diseases (84% of men, 80% of women) and psychiatric disorders (51% of men, 58% of women) were the most common comorbidities. Type 2 diabetes was more common in men than women who died (43% vs 33%) and cancers were more common in women than men (41% vs 30%).
The authors acknowledge that their findings are observational and point to several limitations including that metabolic data (eg, BMI, weight-loss) were not available for the analysis. In addition, they cannot rule out the possibility that other unmeasured factors (including socioeconomic status, race, smoking) or missing data (eg, dietary habits, physical activity behaviours) may have affected the results. Moreover, a control group of non-operated patients with obesity was not included in the analysis.
"The challenge now is to understand potential barriers for men to undergo bariatric surgery and further research should be performed to explore if earlier surgical intervention in men could improve mortality outcomes," added Beiglböck.
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