Pregnancy after stomach surgery has risks

About 12,000 stomach weight-loss operations are performed annually in the Netherlands. Eighty per cent of the patients are women, a quarter of whom want the operation because they want to get pregnant. But a stomach operation poses risks for pregnancy.

Women suffering from obesity often find it difficult to get pregnant. Stomach surgery can help them lose weight. The resulting change in the anatomy and physiology of the gastro-intestinal tract leads to weight loss of up to 25 per cent, most of it in the first 12 months after the operation. ‘Patients can’t eat so much after the surgery as before, and what they do eat is not digested and absorbed to the same extent,’ explains Laura Heusschen. She got a PhD at the end of May on the ‘Nutritional consequences of bariatric