Stomach Stapling & Gastric Bypass - Part II

In the earliest use of such stapling devises for obesity surgery, surgeons removed three staples from the horizontal row of staples and fired the stapler across the top part of the stomach. Doing this staples the two stomach walls together, leaving a small gap where the three staples were removed. The food which is taken in is held up in the portion of stomach above the staple line. This causes a sensation of fullness in the patient after a very small amount of food is consumed. The food then empties slowly through the gap, which is called the stoma, into the stomach below the staple line where digestion takes place normally.

One of the biggest drawbacks of this type of surgery is that the muscular stomach wall has a tendency to stretch and the stoma is able enlarge. Doctors soon learned that although patients lost weight easily for the first few months while the stoma was small, they soon stopped losing and many of them regained all the weight they had lost. Another common complication of this early type of obesity surgery is suture line disruption, which can lead to a myriad of serious medical conditions.