Bariatric Surgery: Does the Weight-Loss Procedure Work?

As popular as bariatric surgery has become — each year, more than 200,000 people undergo stomach-shrinking procedures in an effort to lose weight — the reality is that there is still little information about which patients should be getting the surgeries or how effective they really are as a treatment for obesity. That may change with BOLD, the Bariatric Outcomes Longitudinal Database, the first repository of patient information and outcomes related to bariatric surgery — procedures that include gastric bypass, in which the bulk of the stomach is tied off and food is rerouted directly to the bottom half of the intestine, and gastric banding, in which the stomach is simply squeezed into a smaller size with a rubber-band-like device

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Why Antidepressants Don’t Live Up to the Hype

In the ’90s, Americans grew fond of the idea that you can fix depression simply by taking a pill — most famously fluoxetine , though fluoxetine is just one of at least seven selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors that have been prescribed to treat hundreds of millions of people around the world. But in the past few years, researchers have challenged the effectiveness of Prozac and other SSRIs in several studies. For instance, a review published in the Journal of Affective Disorders in February attributed 68% of the benefit from antidepressants to the placebo effect

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