The Gastric Sleeve has become the world’s most popular weight-loss surgery procedure and is carried out regularly delivering remarkable, life-improving results for patients.
Unlike a Gastric Bypass where food enters a small pouch and then passes straight into the small bowel, the route that food takes following a Sleeve Gastrectomy is the same as it took before surgery.
As the stomach is smaller, it is able to hold less and stretches more quickly to give a feeling of fullness and satisfaction. So patients who have had this procedure want to eat less and therefore lose weight.
What is a Gastric Sleeve?
The Gastric Sleeve (Laparoscopic Sleeve Gastrectomy) is the world’s fastest growing weight loss procedure.
The Gastric Sleeve is a simple concept. The surgeon accesses the abdomen laparoscopically (keyhole surgery) and cuts the stomach along its length and removes about 80%. After Sleeve surgery, the food you eat will still enter and exit the stomach in the same place as it did before (unlike the Gastric Bypass) but you’ll have a much smaller stomach.
The Sleeve helps you lose weight in two ways. It reduces the capacity of your stomach and it also changes the balance of hormones and proteins in the stomach. The change in gut hormones, including changes to GLP1, change and suppress appetite. For this reason Sleeve patients are expected to lose weight quickly.
It’s important to note that your weight loss isn’t directly related to the size of your remaining stomach. The change to gut hormones will facilitate weight loss whether you have a relatively ‘tight’ or ‘loose’ Sleeve.
The Procedure
Sleeve Gastrectomy is carried out laparoscopically (keyhole surgery) under general anaesthesia. Your surgeon will make about five small incisions in your belly. Through one of the incisions, he/she will insert a thin telescope connected to a tiny high-definition video camera. The camera will be connected to a TV screen in theatre which your surgeon will be looking at during the surgery. Through the other cuts, long thin instruments are introduced which your surgeon will use to perform the operation.
During this stomach-reduction surgery, your surgeon will divide and seal any blood vessels supplying the part of the stomach that will be removed.
He will then use a special surgical stapling device to surgically staple and seal your stomach using a calibration guide tube to measure the size of the stomach tube left behind. The surgeon then removes the bulk of your stomach (about 80%) permanently, leaving behind a thin banana-shaped stomach tube or ‘sleeve’, hence the name Sleeve Gastrectomy. No intestines are removed or bypassed during this procedure. The operation takes usually about one hour.