When Revisional Bariatric Surgery Makes Good Sense

When you undergo weight loss surgery, you’re doing so with one goal in mind — losing unhealthy weight. While you’d prefer that you need only one procedure to accomplish this goal, there are times when you may need some follow-up.

When that time comes, our team here at Advanced Surgeons can answer the call with revisional bariatric surgery. 

Here’s a look at a few of the reasons patients come to us to have their original weight loss surgery revised.

Converting for more weight loss

Far and away, the leading driver of revisional weight loss surgery is a failure of the first to get you to your weight loss goals. One study of 221 patients who underwent revisional bariatric surgery cited weight loss failure in nearly 89% of cases.

When this happens, we can perform another surgery to convert the original bariatric surgery into one that’s more aggressive for more weight loss. 

For example, many people convert a gastric band procedure into a more effective gastric sleeve. Or some people move from a sleeve gastrectomy to a gastric bypass to enable more weight loss.

Each of these is a step up from the original to encourage more weight loss.

Correcting the original

There are times when problems can develop after the original surgery that hamper weight loss. A good example of this is when a gastric pouch grows larger over time, and we have to go in to shrink it back down.

And if you had a gastric bypass and you’ve stopped losing weight, we can go in and increase the amount of bypass in your intestines, taking more absorption out of the equation. We can also add another band to a gastric band procedure to shrink your stomach more.

As you can see, we don’t convert these bariatric surgeries, but make some adjustments and corrections to the original.

Undoing your bariatric surgery

Perhaps you had us install a gastric band but you’ve reached your weight loss goals and would like to try functioning with your full stomach volume again. Through revisional bariatric surgery, we can go in and undo the gastric band.

This isn’t possible with other weight loss surgeries, such as a gastric bypass, as we've made irreversible changes to your digestive tract.

When complications arise

Thankfully, bariatric surgeries have low complication rates, but they still happen. If you’re experiencing problems after your weight loss surgery, such as leakage or 

obstruction, we can correct those issues through revisional bariatric surgery.

Whether correcting, converting, or reversing, revisional bariatric surgery is available to you should the need arise.

If you’d like to learn more about revisional bariatric surgery, please contact one of our offices in Valhalla, Carmel, or Poughkeepsie, New York, to schedule an appointment.