Endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty an option when bariatric surgery isn't

Last Updated: 2017-05-11

By Megan Brooks

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Obese adults who are not candidates for bariatric surgery can achieve weight loss with endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty, say researchers from New York.

Endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty (ESG) is a relatively new minimally invasive weight-loss intervention that uses an endoscopic suturing system to reduce the size of the stomach.

Dr. Reem Sharaiha and colleagues from Weill Cornell Medical Center followed 278 obese men and women who underwent either ESG (91 patients), laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (120 patients) or laparoscopic banding (67 patients).

During the one-year follow-up period, ESG patients dropped more weight than patients who had laparoscopic banding, but less weight than those who had laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy.

At one year, total weight loss was about 29% with laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy, compared to about 18% with endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty and 14% with laparoscopic banding (p<0.001).

ESG was associated with fewer complications (1%) than laparoscopic gastrectomy (10%) and laparoscopic banding (11%).

Patients who received endoscopic treatment had shorter hospital stays, often leaving the hospital the same day as treatment, and lower costs than those who had laparoscopic surgery. The average procedural cost of ESG was $12,000 per patient compared with $22,000 for laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy and $15,000 for laparoscopic banding.

Dr. Sharaiha reported the study findings May 6 at Digestive Disease Week (DDW) 2017 in Chicago, Illinois.

“These results support the conclusion that the less invasive option, the endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty, is safe and an effective treatment especially for patients for whom surgical options are not possible for one reason or another,” Dr. Sharaiha noted during a media briefing.

“We're not suggesting,” she emphasized, “that the endoscopic approach should replace the two surgical options. Instead these results show that endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty is another safe and reliable cost-effective option among many options for the weight management methods available these days."

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2qZTmM5

Digestive Disease Week 2017.