Woman Who Underwent Gastric Bypass Surgery Chokes to Death

A 64-year old woman who had recently undergone a gastric bypass surgery choked to death as the food clogged her throat and she was unable to breathe. Pathologist Hugh Jones, from the Royal Cornwall Hospital, revealed the tube that connects the mouth and the stomach, known as the esophagus, had swollen and food had accumulated all the way up to the throat due to which she was unable to breathe.

Dianne Cooper-Clarke, of Cornwall, had undergone a gastric bypass surgery in which the stomach is shrunk so that the patients eat less food and absorb fewer calories. While there are suspicions that the gastric surgery could have been the cause for the dilation of the esophagus, experts say that it would have been characterized by a number of symptoms long before the esophagus swells.

“After surgery, correct behavior should be measuring food, eating small amounts several times a day and not eating to the point where you're too full or throwing up. It takes a long time for the esophagus to dilate out like that, and you'd be symptomatic long before that happened”, Dr. Mitchell Roslin, who is a bariatric surgeon at Lennox Hill Hospital in New York, said.

Source-Medindia