Bariatric Surgery and Health-Related Quality of Life

Abstract

Morbid obesity carries significant risks to the lives of affected individuals, including physical, psychological, and social comorbidities. In addition, the prevalence of obesity in the world has been steadily rising, straining the already exhausted medical care systems. Nonsurgical approaches have been tried; however, bariatric surgery provides the only effective and sustainable approach to treat morbid obesity and reverse its adverse effects.

Health-related quality of life is an important and interesting topic when it comes to evaluate obesity, obesity comorbidities, and bariatric surgery. Numerous studies reported health-related quality of life in bariatric patients; however, there is paucity of studies that examined the psychometric properties of obesity-specific instruments. Moreover, quality of life and health-related quality of life have been wrongly used synonymously. Hence, it is vital to differentiate between quality of life and health-related quality of life.

Content validity is a fundamental concept of the instrument’s validity. A proposed conceptual framework composed of 20 domains pertinent to bariatric surgery and morbid obesity, against which generic and obesity-specific instruments have been assessed. The result of this assessment showed that neither the generic nor obesity-specific instruments were adequate instruments in terms of content validity.

Given the lack of adequate health-related quality of life instruments in the field of the rapidly growing bariatric surgery, the authors suggest building a new specific bariatric instrument informed by the proposed framework, which will then enable the clinicians to assess the full impact of morbid obesity and bariatric surgery on the patients’ quality of life.