WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 (UPI) -- The number of obesity surgeries has jumped dramatically in the last decade, according to newly released U.S. statistics.
The surgeries saw a 2,000 percent increase among patients age 55 to 64 and a 726 percent increase among patients 18 to 54, says a new report by Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
There were a total of 121,055 surgeries performed on all patients in 2004, the last year for which data are available, the study says, and more than nine out of 10 were gastric bypasses.
The procedures, known collectively as bariatric surgery, are recommended for patients who are either extremely obese or who have serious, obesity-related medical conditions like diabetes.
The increased reliance on the surgery to control obesity has come with a cost, the study's authors said. Even though the average cost per patient has decreased by 5 percent to $10,395, the overall hospital costs for bariatric surgery patients increased more than eight-fold from $147 million in 1998 to $1.3 billion in 2004.
As the procedure has become more common, the national death rate for patients undergoing the surgery has declined by 78 percent, according to the new data.
