[Obesity and bariatric surgery: anesthesia implications]

Over the last few years, obesity has been constantly increasing, thus turning it into a serious public health problem, with the subsequent impact on health-related expenditure, particularly in developed countries. The main peculiarity of obesity is its association with numerous pathologies (respiratory disease, cardiovascular problems, endocrinological or metabolic disorders, etc.) that leads it to be related with high levels of mortality and morbidity, affecting both the quality and duration of the life of sufferers. The attempts to prevent obesity and, when these fail, the treatments that can be resorted to cover many aspects: behavioural, dietary and medical. But these are frequently doomed to failure because of their potentially very demanding nature, at which times, after complying with certain minimal requirements and a detailed assessment, it is possible to move on to the next step: bariatric surgery. This is a part of the therapeutic armoury that is enjoying a constant boom, with very favourable results that mean the physiopathology of this condition should be known in greater detail by all of the multidisciplinary team dealing with the problem: GPs, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, general surgeons and anaesthesiologists, with the latter being involved in all of the peri-surgical activity (pre-, intra- and post-operative stages, in the reanimation units). From the standpoint of anaesthesia (the focus of this paper as it is the least well-known of those mentioned), obese individuals are at a disadvantage with respect to other non-obese patients as the process is complicated and the risk increases. With this review of the subject, it is intended to recall the physiopathological changes produced by obesity as well as the anaesthetic implications within the framework of bariatric surgery, so as to achieve the most favourable possible results from the surgery.