Lars Sjöström, M.D., Ph.D., and Claude Bouchard, Ph.D., of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center have tracked more than 4,000 obese patients in the last ten years.

“This was an interventional study,“ said Bouchard, “meaning we enrolled obese patients into the study who had sought surgery and compared them to a similar group who were undergoing conventional treatment during the same time frame. Previous studies were based on much smaller sample sizes, with shorter follow-up periods and did not have the proper control group for comparison. What we learned is that an often controversial method - surgery - presents clear clinical evidence of being beneficial.”

After a decade, those in the surgery group lost 14 percent to 25 percent of their original weight compared to 2 percent in the other group. Of the 2,010 surgery patients, 101 died. There were 129 deaths in the comparison group of 2,037 people.

“We count these results as a milestone in our understanding of the benefits of bariatric surgery for obesity,” Bouchard said. “We are confident in the results and believe this will lead to an acceptance that bariatric surgery is a viable, life-saving option for severely obese patients.”

Also deaths from diabetes in the surgery group were dramatically cut by 92 percent; from cancer by 60 percent and from heart disease by 56 percent. Surprisingly, the surgery group had a higher risk of death from accidents, suicides and other causes not related to disease.

In the United States alone, 177,600 operations were performed last year, according to the American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery. The most common method was gastric bypass, or stomach-stapling surgery, which reduces the stomach to a small walnut-sized pouch and bypasses part of the small intestine where digestion occurs.

In the United States alone, 177,600 operations were performed last year, according to the American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery. The most common method was gastric bypass, or stomach-stapling surgery, which reduces the stomach to a small walnut-sized pouch and bypasses part of the small intestine where digestion occurs.

Earlier this week a study led by Nikhil Dhurandhar, Ph.D., now an associate professor at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, demonstrated in the laboratory experiments that infection with human adenovirus-36 (Ad-36), long recognized as a cause of respiratory and eye infections in humans, transforms adult stem cells obtained from fat tissue into fat cells.

If further research will confirm the results of this study it is very likely that soon we will have a vaccine or antiviral medication to help fight viral obesity in the future.

“We’re not saying that a virus is the only cause of obesity, but this study provides stronger evidence that some obesity cases may involve viral infections,” said study presenter Magdalena Pasarica, M.D., Ph.D., of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, a campus of the Louisiana State University system.

Obesity is an increasingly alarming health condition worldwide and a study published in July added to the alarm: by 2015, 75 percent of American adults will be overweight, 41 percent obese, it says.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Human Nutrition have done a study that said that the percentage of American adults who were obese more than doubled in 40 years, from 13 percent in the ‘60s to 32 percent in 2004. The researchers said the percentage of overweight and obese Americans has increased average rate of 0.3 to 0.8 percentage points a year.