Results of obesity treatment.

Obesity is a chronic disease so that results of obesity treatment should only be evaluated on a long-term basis. The present paper aims at analyzing the long-term (1 year or more) results of three anti-obesity approaches, i.e. lifestyle modifications, pharmacological treatments and surgical procedures. Dietary interventions include diets with moderate calorie restriction and very-low energy diets (VLED). Even if an initial greater weight loss is observed with VLED, no study has conclusively shown that the long-term approaches including VLED are better than non-VLED programmes. Physical activity is not the most efficient method of initial weight loss, but it appears to be more crucial for maintaining weight loss once it has occurred. In general, long-term results of lifestyle modifications are disappointing because of poor compliance. Several 1-2 year large-scale randomized placebo-controlled clinical trials with orlistat, an intestinal lipase inhibitor, and sibutramine, a central appetite regulator, have demonstrated that both drugs significantly, although modestly on average, increase weight reduction, almost double the number of responders (weight loss >=5 or 10% of initial body weight) and improve weight maintenance up to 2 years. Surgical procedures provide a much greater weight reduction than medical interventions in patients with morbid obesity, particularly after a follow-up of several years. Weight loss is greater with gastric bypass, inducing some malbsorption, than with gastroplasty, a pure gastric restriction technique. Associated risk factors such as markers of insulin resistance syndrome and type 2 diabetes are remarkably reduced, but no prospective study of morbidity or mortality is available yet. In all cases, the management of obesity requires a multidisciplinary approach to improve the success rate.