HealthDay News — Bariatric surgery is associated with a significantly lower risk for developing major metabolic comorbidities compared with a medical weight management program for adults with obesity, according to a study published online Sept. 9 in JAMA Network Open. Amanda L. Bader, M.D., from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and colleagues conducted a retrospective, multicenter cohort study using data from the Veterans Health Administration Corporate Data Warehouse to assess whether bariatric surgery reduces the risk for developing metabolic comorbidities compared with a medical weight management program for patients with obesity. The analysis included 263,657 veterans who enrolled in a weight management program and 5,813 who underwent bariatric surgery. Compared with the weight management program, bariatric surgery was associated with a statistically significantly lower risk for incident type 2 diabetes (hazard ratio [HR], 0.21), hypertension (HR, 0.41), hyperlipidemia (HR, 0.49), OSA (HR, 0.43), and MASLD (HR, 0.60). “This finding supports the relevance of bariatric surgery as a durable approach for obesity-related risk mitigation,” the authors write.