Bariatric Surgery Worldwide: Baseline Demographic Description and One-Year Outcomes from the Second IFSO Global Registry Report 2013-2015.

BACKGROUND

Five International Federation for the Surgery of Obesity and Metabolic Disorders (IFSO) surveys since 1998 have estimated the volume and type of bariatric surgery being done in constituent member countries. These reports did not include baseline demographic descriptions.

METHODS

An IFSO Global Registry pilot project in 2014 demonstrated that it was possible to amalgamate large numbers of individual patient data from different local and national database systems. Here we describe demographic data from the second report for 54,490 patients from 31 countries operated in the 3 calendar years 2013-2015 and follow up data from 66,560 of 112,544 patients in 2009-2015.

RESULTS

Most procedures (97.8%) were performed laparoscopically and 73.3% (95% CI: 73.0-73.7%, range 54.2 to 80.3%) were female. The average age was 42.0 years (95% CI 41.9-42.1, inter-quartile range 33.0-51.0 years) and the median body mass index was 43.3 kg/m (inter-quartile range 39.4-48.8 kg/m). Before surgery, 22.0% patients had type 2 diabetes (inter-country variation 7.4-63.2%); 31.9% were hypertensive (15.8-92.7%); 17.6% had depression (0.0-46.3%); 27.8% took medication for musculoskeletal pain (0.0-58.9%); 18.9% had sleep apnea (0.0-63.2%); and 29.6% of patients had gastro-esophageal reflux disease (9.1-90.9%). Gastric bypass was the most prevalent operation (49.4%), followed by sleeve gastrectomy (40.7%) and gastric banding (5.5%). The 1-year total weight loss for patients with available data was 30.53% (95% CI: 30.22-30.84%) and in the cohort 2009-15 was 30.4% with a follow-up rate of 59.14%. In the 2009-2015 cohort, 64.7% of patients on treatment for diabetes preoperatively were not on treatment postoperatively.

CONCLUSIONS

There is widespread variation in access to surgery and in baseline patient characteristics in the countries submitting data to the IFSO Global Registry.