Surgery in obese patients, especially in laproscopic surgery, may require the use of a pulmonary artery catheter and an arterial line, says a study published in the new issue of Archives of Surgery.
Morbid obesity is a condition that has a genetic component and often gets magnified by environmental, social and psychological factors. For such people, diet and exercise do not show many results in controlling the obesity.One of the most common procedures to control morbid obesity is by gastric bypass surgery that reduces the size of the stomach and allows the food to pass to the small intestine much faster. Together with psychological and behavioral support, this procedure has become one of the ways to control obesity through lasting weight loss. The current study was done with 13 patients who underwent laproscopic gastric bypass for morbid obesity.
This type of surgery leads to many dominant damaging respiratory and homodynamic changes that may be of temporary variety. Most of the changes happen at the time of making of pneumoperitoneum. In such cases the use of intra-operative homodynamic monitoring using a pulmonary artery catheter and an arterial line often becomes essential.
