There were no differences in all-cause mortality between patients who had sleeve gastrectomy or Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB), but operations, hospitalizations, and other longer-term problems were more often associated with RYGB than sleeve gastrectomy, according to a new JAMA Surgery paper reporting results from the PCORnet® Bariatric Study.
The paper describes how researchers used resources from PCORnet, the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network, to build a diverse cohort of over 33,000 patients who underwent one of these two different types of bariatric surgery. Researchers were able to investigate the rates of longer-term problems up to five years after patients had their bariatric surgeries.
In an audio interview, study author Anita Courcoulas, MD, MPH, FACS, said that this research was different from past studies in that, by using PCORnet, researchers were able to leverage real-world clinical data from electronic health records and link that data to insurance claims data and other sources.
This information will help guide patients and their doctors in making important decisions about bariatric surgery as they weigh the rates of potential risks associated with each procedure and the average amount of weight loss produced by each, she noted. Study findings on how much weight patients lost and kept off were published in an earlier paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Courcoulas also discussed the important role that bariatric patients, including co-investigator Neely Williams helped in shaping and guiding the study at every step.