Surgical treatment of morbid obesity

Morbid obesity is a multifactorial disease with great importance because of its 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. The different interventions can be classified into mal-absorptive, 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 fact was not characteristic to the formerly used procedures. These include: minimal aggressivity, reversibility, preservation of the gastrointestinal anatomy, adaptability for demands of care.