Predicting Responses to Bariatric and Metabolic Surgery.

Many pre-operative factors have been proposed as negative or positive predictors of body weight reduction after surgery. However, none of these factors has been consistently demonstrated to have a sufficiently strong predictive power to influence eligibility to bariatric surgery itself. Weight regain can occur after bariatric surgery and its probability seems to be more influenced by post-operative behavioral factors than by pre-operative predictors. Several effective scores have been developed to predict diabetes remission after surgery, however long-term maintenance and diabetes recurrence after surgery seem again more influenced by post-operative behaviors and weight loss maintenance. In general, more attention and active interventions to pre-operative and post-operative eating behaviors and lifestyle modifications are probably more important at the clinical level than the search of pre-operative predictors of long-term outcomes.