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Beyond Baby Fat; Teenagers Turn to Surgery to Shrink Their Stomachs

From 1993 to 2003, the number of stomach-reduction surgeries has gone from 16,000, to almost 10,000 operations. The surgery was only for adults, but now teenagers are relying on the surgery to save their life. In New York City, at least half a dozen of the major hospitals offer surgery for teenagers and even have a waiting list. The number of surgeries on teenagers is not available since most hospitals do not count their surgeries by age. Most doctors interviewed claimed to not operate on a child younger than 15 years old but would have to make an exception to severe cases. According to Dr. Sugarman, children as young as 12 years old have undergone stomach- reduction surgery here in the United States. Children are requesting the two of the weight loss surgeries known as banding, where a band is wrapped around the stomach to reduce its size and ultimately food intake and then the riskier alternative, gastric bypass surgery.
There is little research on the long term effects if children undergoing lap banding or gastric bypass surgery. Altering the size of a teenagers stomach to the size of a golf ball raises some questions. Medical director at the Center for Obesity Surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital supports surgery in extreme cases, but still says teenagers and their parents need to be cautious. The children are not fully developed yet and the surgery can reduce their nutritional intake. Just in the past to decades, the number of overweight teenagers has tripled. From the ages of 12 to 19, 15 percent of the teenagers are overweight. Sometimes surgery is the only case left for some of these cases. For instance, Sally Apuzo, under went gastric bypass surgery when she was 16 years old. She tried everything from fat camp to exercise but would always gain the weight back. Her heaviest weight was 256 pound and only 5’1 tall. She suffered from various health problems...