“Bariatric surgery reduces cancer risk by 5 times”

2023-08-29 20:03:00

“Like Sicob, by exploiting the media and social networks, we are trying to make everyone aware that severe obesity is not an aesthetic pathology but is a serious disease associated with important comorbidities such as type 2 diabetes mellitus, arterial hypertension, crises cardiovascular disease, cancer. Few people know that there is a relationship of about 13% between obesity and cancer and that bariatric surgery statistically reduces the risk of cancer by five times. Sicob is committed to communicating it”. This was stated by Marco Antonio Zappa, national president of the Italian Society of Surgery for Obesity and Metabolic Diseases (Sicob), on the occasion of the XXXI National Congress, underway in Naples, during the symposium ‘Communicating obesity’ promoted by Johnson & Johnson MedTech.

“For some years – continued Zappa – obesity has been included in the essential levels of assistance (Lea) but we need to do more: it is true that it has been recognized as a chronic pathology but we are still in its infancy. Also at an economic level it would be fundamental because an obese patient is an economic cost due to the comorbidities associated with the pathology. Sicob is a promoter, through the institutions, of the recognition of this pathology as a condition for an effective essential level of assistance”.

Finally, the president returned to the theme of the stigma experienced by patients with obesity which also affects clinicians. “The fundamental error that lives in the scientific community and in ordinary people is that the obese population is guilty. It is time to change this perception. And even the bariatric surgeon has the stigma of being a bariatric surgeon, because very often the surgeon is defined as important when operating on a tumor while when operating on an obese subject, he becomes a second-class surgeon. Nothing could be more false, because operating on an obese patient in laparoscopy is perhaps more difficult than operating on stomach cancer”, he concluded.