Severe Mental Illness Appears Not To Be A Barrier To Undergoing Bariatric Surgery

Medscape (5/3, Davenport) reports, “Severe mental illness need not be considered as a barrier to undergoing bariatric surgery,” researchers found after studying “patients who underwent bariatric surgery in 2012–2013 in seven US healthcare systems in the Patient Outcomes Research to Advance Learning (PORTAL) network.”

The study revealed that “patients with preexisting mental-health disorders can achieve comparable weight loss to those without mental illness.” The findings were published in the May issue of Obesity. The author of an accompanying editorial wrote that a diagnosis of mental illness “can no longer be considered a viable exclusion criterion.”

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