Laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy for morbid obesity.

The epidemic of obesity in the United States is a major public health issue and more than a third of adults are now considered obese (body mass index > or = 30 kg/m(2)). Surgery for morbid obesity, bariatric surgery, is the most durable treatment for this disease and about 140,000 cases are performed annually. Laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (LSG) has been advocated as the first of a 2-stage procedure for the high-risk, super-obese patient. More recently, LSG has been studied as a single-stage procedure for weight loss in the morbidly obese. LSG has been shown in initial studies to produce excellent excess weight loss comparable with laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass in many series with a very low incidence of major complications and death. We describe our technique for LSG.