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Obesity surgery, also called bariatric surgery, reduces the risk of developing colorectal cancer by almost a third of cases. This has been verified by research presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Metabolism Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS) that has seen that those who underwent weight loss surgery were 37% less likely to develop colorectal cancer compared with those who were obese but did not undergo the aforementioned surgery.
Being overweight or obese is known to increase the risk of many types of cancer, including colorectal cancer, as well as other life-threatening diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.
Furthermore, it has been shown that bariatric surgery, such as gastric bypass, is the most effective and long-lasting treatment for severe obesity. Thanks to it, diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and hypertension are improved or resolved and lead to significant and lasting weight loss.
In this meta-analysis, researchers from the Military Institution of Aviation Medicine in Warsaw, Poland, the Texas Tech School of Medicine in El Paso, and the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine in Rochester, USA, examined data from 13 previous studies on bariatric surgery and colorectal cancer. Collectively, the analyzes had monitored more than 3.2 million patients for up to 10 years.
The included studies were published between 2008 and 2021, which the researchers say covers a longer period and is more up-to-date than previous systematic reviews on the topic.
According to our data, “bariatric surgery may offer significant protection against colorectal cancer in people with obesity that extends at least 10 years, the length of follow-up in several of the studies we analyzed,” says study co-author Dr. Michal Janik, of the Military Institute of Aviation Medicine.
“This is an important finding because colorectal cancer takes time to develop, and even for a decade, the protective effect is still there.”
However, the study did not take into account risk factors other than obesity and did not measure weight loss or correlate the findings with any particular method of weight-loss surgery.
The researchers say that future studies should take into account the difference in colorectal cancer incidence between different types of bariatric surgery and in patients with different durations of obesity.
“This study shows that by treating obesity with surgery, you may also be preventing colorectal cancer at the same time, not to mention a host of other diseases and conditions that are ameliorated, resolved or prevented.” Shanu Kotharipresident of ASMBS, who was not involved in the study.
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