The average sized person, when he or she hears that a friend or an acquaintance has had weight reduction surgery, thinks “stomach stapling”. Most people don’t know about the half dozen different types of weight loss surgeries available today. They only remember the name of the very first type of Gastric Bypass Surgery: Stomach Stapling. The medical name of this type of surgery is Horizontal Gastroplasty.

Stomach Stapling Surgery began in the 1960s, when Dr. Edward E. Mason of the University of Iowa realized that women who had undergone partial gastrectomy for peptic ulcer disease tended to remain underweight following this surgery, and that it was very difficult to achieve weight gain in this patient group. Dr. Mason, who is known as the Father of Obesity Surgery, applied the principles of partial gastrectomy to surgery for obese females, and found that these women did indeed lose weight. He was able to create a partition across the upper stomach using surgical staples; this surgery did not require removal of any of the stomach.

During the War efforts of WWII, the Russians developed a method of using surgical instruments which allowed stapling of various body tissues together as a quick and simple method of dealing with war injuries. This concept was adapted, as well as refined, by American surgical instrument makers after the war. This lead to the surgical stapling instruments which are still in use today. These instruments are capable of laying down up to four parallel rows of staples, to create a partition. The instrument also comes with a knife blade which will cut between the newly placed staple rows, dividing and sealing the stapled tissues simultaneously. Other instruments place circular rows of staples which will join two tubes end to end; a procedure which is very useful in connecting intestine together. This procedure is used in later types of obesity surgeries.

In the earliest use of such stapling devises for obesity surgery, surgeons removed three staples from the horizontal row of staples and fired the stapler across the top part of the stomach. Doing this staples the two stomach walls together, leaving a small gap where the three staples were removed. The food which is taken in is held up in the portion of stomach above the staple line. This causes a sensation of fullness in the patient after a very small amount of food is consumed. The food then empties slowly through the gap, which is called the stoma, into the stomach below the staple line where digestion takes place normally.

One of the biggest drawbacks of this type of surgery is that the muscular stomach wall has a tendency to stretch and the stoma is able enlarge. Doctors soon learned that although patients lost weight easily for the first few months while the stoma was small, they soon stopped losing and many of them regained all the weight they had lost. Another common complication of this early type of obesity surgery is suture line disruption, which can lead to a myriad of serious medical conditions.

Tags: stomach stapling, edward mason, gastric bypass, weight loss surgery, horizontal gastroplasty