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Malnutrition is culprit

Nerve damage seen after obesity surgery

Operations to treat obesity, such as stomach-stapling, may work a little too well, causing some patients to develop nerve damage — a symptom of malnutrition, doctors warn.

People who get these kinds of procedures may need to take vitamins and get regular checks from specialists, the researchers said. They found a number of patients who got gastric bypass surgery or other operations to limit food intake later developed signs of nerve damage called peripheral neuropathy.

Malnutrition appeared to be the culprit, Dr. James Dyck told a science briefing sponsored by the American Medical Association.

Dyck is a professor of neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

"Patients who developed peripheral neuropathy lost more weight ... and they lost weight at a much faster rate."

The patients who developed the nervous-system symptoms also tended to have more nausea, diarrhea as well as a symptom called dumping, in which food goes undigested from the stomach to the intestine.

All these can cause poor absorption of vitamins, Dyck said. Neuropathy can be caused by a lack of vitamin B-12 and can lead to permanent disability.

Symptoms include tingling, numbness and sometimes stabbing pain.
 
For the study, published in the journal Neurology, researchers looked at the records of 435 patients who got obesity surgery.

Dyck stressed that his study did not look at a representative sample. In his case 71 patients, or 16 percent, developed peripheral neuropathy after surgery.

Restaurant dining drops

U.S. holds steady in battle of the bulge

The number of overweight Americans is holding steady as consumers become more aware of what they eat, an annual report by market research firm The NPD Group said.

The percent of overweight Americans reached 62 percent for the second year in a row, the report said. The rate had increased every year between 1995 and 2002.

"At some point we knew this would happen," said NPD vice president Harry Balzer, the author of the report. "Americans just couldn't continue to put on weight."

The report, which is based on 12 months of data collected through February of this year, found that 27 percent of U.S. consumers say they are conscious of the number of calories in their meals, the highest level in five years.

Consumers also ate at restaurants less often than they did in 1985. The number of restaurant takeout meals Americans eat also has leveled off after increasing for more than 10 years.

Shots switched in 2000

Vaccine-related polio appears to be gone

A switch in the type of polio vaccine recommended for use in the United States appears to have wiped out U.S. cases of the disease caused by the vaccine itself, the government says.

In 2000, U.S. policy-makers recommended that doctors use only shots containing inactivated polio virus. They reached that conclusion after receiving evidence that the oral vaccine containing live polio virus might have actually caused cases of the disease in rare instances.

The strategy seems to have worked: Government data from 1990 to 2003 show that the last case of vaccine-related polio occurred in 1999, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researcher Lorraine Nino Alexander and colleagues from the CDC pronounced that a "major public-health accomplishment."

Seattle Times news services