A British government health agency recommended Wednesday that doctors offer the controversial stomach-stapling surgery to severely obese children, AP reported. In an attempt to deal with the rising obesity epidemic across Britain, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, or Nice, issued its first national guidelines for obesity in adults and children. Britain has the worst obesity rates in Europe, with the number of overweight or obese people tripling in the past 25 years. A third of all adults and a fifth of all children will be obese by 2010. Nice said obesity in the country is now more damaging to health than smoking, heavy drinking or poverty. The health watchdog recommends that city planners, employers and schools take steps to help people exercise regularly. This would include measures such as creating more bike paths, pedestrianized areas, subsidizing gym memberships, and offering healthier food choices. Diet and exercise should be the first line of defense in the war against obesity, followed by drug treatments. As a last resort, Nice said surgery should be available. While such advice already exists for adults, the guidelines now recommend that children who have gone through puberty and who are seriously overweight _ and if they have other risk factors such as diabetes or high blood pressure _ be given the option of having their stomachs stapled. Young people will only have surgery if they have undergone a psychological assessment and if all other methods of weight loss have failed. The surgery essentially reshapes the stomach by using staples and bands to create a small stomach pouch. This limits the amount of food the patient can eat, as well as slowing the digestion process. Similar guidance for the surgery exists in the U.S., but Britain is the first European country to recommend that children be eligible for the procedure. The stomach stapling operation would be performed by the state-funded national health service, and costs about 10,000 pounds (US$20,000; ¤15,000). «Some of the treatment options we are recommending in this guideline, such as offering anti-obesity drugs, and in extreme cases, surgery to children, will be seen as highly controversial,» said Professor John Wilding, a professor of medicine at Liverpool University's Aintree hospital. But such radical action is warranted when faced with such a major threat to the country's children, he said. Obesity in children is particularly worrying because it is associated with earlier onset of diseases like diabetes and hypertension, which in extreme cases can result in death. «The surgery is very much an ultimate last chance when everything else has failed,» said Dr. Beckie Lang, of the Association for the Study of Obesity. Lang estimates that only a handful of children will qualify for this surgery each year. «We needed this guidance because clinicians are seeing increasing numbers of people that are morbidly obese,» she said. Experts emphasize that unless action is taken now to reverse the obesity epidemic, rates of diseases like diabetes will continue to climb. Obesity costs Britain an estimated 3.7 billion pounds (US$7.4 billion; ¤4.4 billion) each year in health and economic costs.
