Lack of benefit of routine abdominal CT-scan before bariatric surgery

Scientific societies recommend to seek cancer prior to bariatric surgery. In our tertiary referral center, we aimed to study performance of abdominal CT-scan before bariatric surgery.

We retrospectively included all patients who underwent bariatric surgery and a pre-operative abdominal CT-scan in our academic center, between January 2015 and December 2018.

We included 521 patients (417 women and 104 men) with a mean age of 48.0±11.5 years. Mean preoperative body mass index was 44.9±7.0kg/m². Among the 392 patients with abnormal CT-scan, mean number of anomalies per patient was of 2.2±1.2. Vast majority of anomalies (91.8%) were non-significant. Only 5 (1%) patients needed treatment prior to bariatric surgery. No factor predictive of abnormal CT-scan was found.

Only few patients had severe anomaly on CT-scan before bariatric surgery. Abdominal CT-scan could not be advocated to seek cancer before bariatric surgery.