[Surgical treatment of morbid obesity]

Morbid obesity is a multicausal disease with great importance because of the life threatening associated co-morbidities. Its treatment has many different aspects and needs multidisciplinary collaborations. The most powerful way of treatment is the surgical intervention which demands thorough preoperative investigations and patient selection. The bariatric surgical procedures went through significant development and many of them have only historical importance. Different interventions can be classified to malabsorptive, restrictive and combined subgroups. In Europe the laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding seems to be the most widely applied procedure which is purely a restrictive intervention. Apart from the low rate of complications it has many advantages which were not characteristic of the formerly used procedures. These include: minimal invasiveness, reversibility, preservation of the gastrointestinal anatomy, adjustability for demands of care.