The Sleeve Gastrectomy Procedure

Gastric Sleeve is modification of an old technique called Magenstrasse and Mill procedure. This new technique removes the unused portion of the stomach permanently.

Watch an animation of how the procedure is performed.

Procedure

The gastric sleeve originated as stage 1 of the Duodenal Switch procedure in the super morbidly obese. In some high-risk super obese patients Duodenal Switch is proposed in two stages to reduce the overall risk of complications, technical difficulty and improve outcomes. Stage 1 is the vertical sleeve gastrectomy or gastric sleeve. After patients lost a significant amount of weight following the sleeve gastrectomy several months later patients underwent the second stage procedure, which is the intestinal bypass component of the Duodenal Switch. However follow-up studies indicated that a significant number of the sleeve gastrectomy patients lost enough weight with Stage 1 that they didn???t need the Stage 2. Currently Gastric Sleeve is utilized as an independent weight loss procedure.

Limitations

The main limitation of this procedure is that there are no long-term results confirming weight loss maintenance since it is a newer procedure. Existing data indicates that weight loss with Sleeve gastrectomy is better than the Lapband and slightly less than the Gastric bypass and the Duodenal Switch. However, with the gastric sleeve there is always the option of adding the intestinal bypass component or converting it to a Gastric bypass if weight loss results are not satisfactory. This procedure is permanent with no options of reversibility. Since this is a new procedure, insurance policies does not cover gastric sleeve yet.