 "Photo: Michael J. Wyen")
One-third of U.S. adults are clinically obese, according to the National Institutes for Health - and some turn to drastic weight loss solutions, such as gastric bypass surgery.
The surgery is risky, invasive and expensive. Keri Stephens, an Ohio State senior in psychology, is researching factors that affect weight loss success.
"It is important to provide accurate predictors of the success for this surgery due to the increasing demand," she said.
Her project, "Psychiatric Diagnosis and percentage of EBI (excess body weight) lost one year post-bariatric surgery," is at the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum. She studied people with psychiatric disorders and the success of weight loss.
"We unexpectedly found that people who are diagnosed with psychiatric disorders, such as depression and eating disorders, lose more weight after bariatric surgery, than those without pre-surgery diagnosis," Stephens said.
She started her research last summer in a lab with Dr. Gail L. Kaye, a program director in the college of education and human ecology.
She used OSU medical records for a sample of 75 women and 11 men between the ages of 22 and 61. She found 75 percent of the people were diagnosed with one disorder before the surgery, she said. She examined how much weight people lost, in relation to diagnosis of disorders.
On average, patients lost 60 percent of their excess body weight from gastric bypass surgery, but those diagnosed lost more, she said.
"We couldn't determine what specific psychiatric disorders are associated with increased weight loss," she said. "It's partly due to non-standardized psychiatric evaluation methods and incomplete medical assessments before surgery."
One of the biggest problems in the study is misdiagnosis of psychiatric disorders, she said. People can go to psychiatrists outside OSU and could be diagnosed incorrectly or disorders can be overlooked.
"The fact that people diagnosed with disorders lose more weight could be due to increased motivation in our population and culture today," she said. "Previous studies on the topic have been really contradictory and inconclusive, that's why I am doing this."
She said it is hard to make a concrete conclusion because so many recent studies like this are conflicting.
"I am planning to continue my research in graduate school and hopefully look at patients from 2003, 2004 and 2005," Stephens said. "I'll have a larger sample size and will try to determine some specific diagnoses that are involved in the relationship."
Laura Allen can be reached at allen.878@osu.edu.
Be the first to comment on this article!