Gastric bypass surgery and similar operations for severe obesity lead to long-term weight loss, and people who have undergone such a procedure have lower risks for heart disease and diabetes than conventionally treated individuals, according to a new Swedish study.

Dr. Lars Sjostrom, at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Goteborg, and his colleagues tracked some 4000 severely obese subjects, of whom 1845 underwent weight loss surgery. A total of 641 in the surgery group and 627 non-surgery “control” subjects completed their 10-year examination.

At that point, weight had increased by 1.6 percent in the control group and decreased by 16.1 percent in the surgical group.

Calorie intake was lower and physical activity was higher in the surgery group than the control group throughout the study, the team found.

Recovery from high blood pressure, diabetes, high triglyceride levels, and a low HDL (‘good’) cholesterol level “was more frequent in the surgical group than in the control group, both at 2 and 10 years,” the researchers note in Thursday’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Furthermore, after 10 years diabetes had developed in 24 percent of those in the non-surgery group and 7 percent in the surgery group.

Weight loss surgery “is currently the most successful approach to ‘rescuing’ patients with severe Obesity and reversing or preventing the development of several diseases associated with obesity,” Drs. Caren G. Solomon and Robert G. Dluhy write in a related editorial.

But “it would be an even greater success to make these procedures unnecessary,” they add, through interventions to improve dietary habits and increase physical activity beginning early in life.

SOURCE: New England Journal of Medicine, December 23, 2004.