A leading health expert has come out publicly and said that he thinks teenagers and perhaps even children should be fitted with gastric bands.
Professor Nick Finer of University College Hospital is an expert in obesity and earlier in the year told the Royal Society of Medicine that severely obese children should be permitted to undergo bariatric surgery, such as gastric banding.
He says that as excess fat can affect the blood vessels in children as young as 6, the ethical issues regarding surgery for children are outweighed by the dangers of not taking action.
The former chair of the UK Association for the Study of Obesity told The Times that the current guidelines set out by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) which say that a patient must have a body mass index of over 40 (or 35 in cases where there are severe health problems) and that surgery for under-18s should only be considered in the most extreme circumstances are too conservative.
He added that the treatment of obesity could be likened to the attitudes regarding treating children with leukaemia, as when chemotherapy first became available people argue that it was unethical to subject children to the suffering chemotherapy causes when it might only extend life by a year. That life expectancy has now been significantly extended with 70% of cases of childhood leukaemia being cured, and he believes that similarly doctors should see whether surgery could be successful in helping prevent diabetes and liver disease in children.
The Times article comes in the same week that a report was published in renowed medical journal The Lancet, in which health experts said that surgery should only be considered in the most severe cases and only when diet and exercise treatments had failed.
The report pointed out that in 9 out of 10 cases of childhood obesity, lifestyle was the cause of the problem rather than hormonal problems or genes.