The Next Big Kids Craze: Gastric Bypass

That's right America and this is no joke, Texas Children’s Hospital performed the first child gastric bypass back in 2003 and now they perform one or two bypasses each month on kids and teens. “I honestly believe that in 5 to 10 years you’ll see as many children getting weight-loss procedures as adults,” said Dr. Evan Nadler, co-director of the Obesity Institute at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington.
Make it a large fry and coke America!

Surgery for Obese Children?
(NYTimes.com) One callous question turned Brittany Caesar into a medical pioneer: “Why do you eat so much? It’s not normal.”

At that moment, she was in the Campbell Middle School cafeteria, sitting down to her usual lunch: two cheeseburgers, two orders of fries and a Coke. She knew she weighed too much. Her whole family weighed too much. But her world revolved around food, and she could not imagine any other existence.

“Food was my best friend,” she said. “It was always there for me.” Somehow, her classmate’s taunt, back in 2003, wounded her in a way the usual fat jokes never had. She fled to the bathroom and wept, vowing to lose weight. Her salvation did not arrive until more than a year later when, at age 14, doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital performed a gastric bypass that left her stomach the size of an egg. On the day of surgery, she weighed 404 pounds.

Ms. Caesar, now 20 years old and 175 pounds, was the first teenager to undergo a gastric bypass at Texas Children’s, but more quickly followed. Today, it maintains one of the busiest bariatric practices for adolescents in the country, performing one or two bypasses each month. Although the procedure is still considered experimental for children, it is fast becoming the next front in the battle against pediatric obesity.

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SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/health/16teen.html