Endosleeve

As emphasized elsewhere, the optimal treatment of patients with morbid obesity (BMI greater than 35 kg/m2) has been and still is some form of bariatric surgery. For those people however, who want to lose weight but their BMI is less than 35 kg/m2, there is now a novel endoscopic (non operative) technique available. During this endoscopic, outpatient procedure, a series of sutures are placed at six different levels within the stomach. The result is the reduction of the dimensions inside the stomach and this allows for much less space available to receive food. Thus, patients are able to consume much less food and they lose weight. Our team was the first to apply this technique in Greece and our results are very good, because we choose patients carefully not including patients with morbid obesity who obviously need a very significant weight loss.

Another group of patients that this method is applied is those patients who have undergone gastric bypass or sleeve gastrectomy in the past, they lost weight, but now they have regained some of the weight they had originally lost. This is usually because the narrow anastomosis (the “connection”) between the stomach and the small bowel performed during the initial operation, has become wider with time. This allows for much faster transportation of food from the stomach to the bowel, so the stomach never gets “full” and the patient can now ingest much larger quantities of food. Using this very advanced endoscopic technique, we are able to place sutures without an operation inside the stomach and reduce the size of the anastomosis again to what it was supposed to be. This leads to a much fuller stomach and much less quantity of food tolerated. Thus, weight is lost again. The application of this technique especially to postoperative patients who have regained weight offers a truly very attractive alternative, since their other two remaining options were either to be subjected to a second operation, or simply accept the fact of regained weight and live with this.