New weight loss surgery made in Almaty

An advanced bariatric surgery has been made in Almaty, Tengrinews reports. A team of leading surgeons of the Central Clinical Hospital of the Medical Center for Kazakhstan President's Affairs Administration lead by an invited expert from Lithuania -- professor Almantas Maleckas -- made a bariatric surgery new for Kazakhstan weight loss practices. The surgery involved re-routing the small intestines to a small stomach pouch (gastric bypass). The patient was a 47-y.o. woman from Almaty. She has been overweight for a long time. The woman wasn't tall, but her weight was 150 kilograms. The obesity was causing her different health problems: arthronosos, diabetes, etc. Other ways of treatment didn’t suit her, and the diets had only a temporary effect. That is why the woman decided to take a weight loss surgery. "We will form the small pouch of 20-30 milliliters from the upper part of the stomach. The stomach will be reduced by almost 90% and connected directly to the small intestine. The point is that this greatly decreases the patient's onetime food intake capacity. And since the food will go directly to the small intestine, it will trigger production of special gastrointestinal hormones shortly after she starts eating. The hormones will give a signal to her brain that the stomach is fool. This will reduce the patient’s appetite and give her an early sensation of fullness." "Bariatric surgeries (weight loss surgery) of that kind have been made in Kazakhstan for a while already, but the technique of the Lithuanian professor that he showed to his colleagues from Kazakhstan is very advanced and had not been used in Kazakhstan before. The method used by professor Maleckas is one of the progressive techniques and we would like to master the procedure, because there are pretty many patients that turn to us with the obesity problem, so we need a solution to it. We can make this surgery together with our endocrinologists in our clinic," deputy chief surgeon Daniyar Amangaliyev shared after the surgery. "First of all, the procedure is made under general anesthesia with the use of minimally invasive laparoscopic approach. It requires the surgeons to make only several little incisions. Secondly, the alimentary function of the stomach remains unchanged, and the recovery period of the patient reduces to a few days. The problem of metabolic syndrome is becoming serious in Kazakhstan, too,” he continued. According to the doctors, the bariatric surgery enables patents to lose 40-50 kilograms in the first year after the surgery. Kazakhstan intends to send several surgeons to Lithuania to learn the technique and to start making these surgeries in Kazakhstan in 2014. The approximate cost of the surgery will make 600-700 thousand tenge ($3900-4600). Patients become eligible for the surgery starting from the age of 16. By Vladimir Prokopenko