Overview
The sleeve gastrectomy is a bariatric and metabolic procedure used in bariatric weight loss programs that causes weight loss by creating physical and chemical changes in your body.
How it Works
The sleeve gastrectomy works physically by changing to the shape and size of your stomach, reducing the amount of food you eat at one-time. Surgeons create a small stomach "sleeve," or pocket. It's about the size of a banana, usually holding about 3 ounces. After the "sleeve" is created, the leftover part of the stomach is removed. When you eat, the food goes from the sleeve to the intestine, where it is absorbed.
The sleeve gastrectomy works chemically by changing the signals your stomach sends to the rest of your body, including your brain. These signals in your body control your blood sugar levels, increase feelings of fullness, decrease hunger, and affect how your body processes and stores the calories from food.
These physical and chemical changes help your body better manage the food you eat and the amount of fat you store. In fact, these changes actually help reset your body's ability to manage fat and weight. Like other metabolic surgeries, the sleeve gastrectomy changes your body's fat set point to a lower healthier level. The surgery does this by changing the signals between the stomach, brain, and liver.
Advantages
Sleeve gastrectomy may change your body fat set point and cause weight loss, but it also has an impact on a condition called metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome often comes before type 2 diabetes. Similar to the gastric bypass, studies have shown that the changes from sleeve gastrectomy can improve metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes before patients even begin to lose weight.
Patients have seen an average of 66% decrease in their total excess body weight with sleeve gastrectomy over 3 years. |