Troisi A. Emergence of bariatric psychiatry as a new subspecialty. World J Psychiatry 2022; 12(1): 108-116 [PMID: 35111582 DOI: 10.5498/wjp.v12.i1.108]
Corresponding Author of This Article
Alfonso Troisi, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Systems Medicine, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Via Montpellier 1, Rome 00133, Italy. alfonso.troisi@uniroma2.it
Research Domain of This Article
Psychiatry
Article-Type of This Article
Minireviews
Open-Access Policy of This Article
This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
World J Psychiatry. Jan 19, 2022; 12(1): 108-116 Published online Jan 19, 2022. doi: 10.5498/wjp.v12.i1.108
Emergence of bariatric psychiatry as a new subspecialty
Alfonso Troisi
Alfonso Troisi, Department of Systems Medicine, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome 00133, Italy
Author contributions: Troisi A conceived and wrote the review.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The author declares no conflict of interests for this article.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Alfonso Troisi, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Systems Medicine, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Via Montpellier 1, Rome 00133, Italy. alfonso.troisi@uniroma2.it
Received: February 24, 2021 Peer-review started: February 24, 2021 First decision: July 15, 2021 Revised: July 19, 2021 Accepted: December 29, 2021 Article in press: November 29, 2021 Published online: January 19, 2022
Abstract
Bariatric surgery is the branch of surgery aimed at helping a person with obesity lose weight. The implementation of surgical treatment of obesity is growing at an impressive rate. As expected, the expanding implementation of bariatric procedures has progressively revealed critical issues that were not evident when the number of obese patients treated with surgery was relatively small. One critical issue is the importance of mental health assessment and care of bariatric patients. The aim of this review is to provide readers with an up-to-date summary of the goals, methods, and clinical strategies of bariatric psychiatry. The aims can be grouped into three distinct categories. First, to ascertain that there are no psychiatric contraindications to safe bariatric surgery. Second, to diagnose and treat pre-surgery mental conditions that could predict poor weight loss. Third, to diagnose and treat post-surgery mental conditions associated with poor quality of life. Although bariatric psychiatry has gained the status of a new subspecialty within the field of mental health and psychopathology, many clinical questions remain unsolved. We need more long-term data on outcome measures such as quality of life, adherence to behavioral guidelines, risk of suicide, and post-surgery prevalence of psychological disturbances and mental disorders.
Core Tip: Bariatric psychiatry has gained the status of a new subspecialty within the field of mental health and psychopathology. The aims of bariatric psychiatry can be grouped into three distinct categories. First, to ascertain that there are no psychiatric contraindications to safe bariatric surgery. Second, to diagnose and treat pre-surgery mental conditions that could predict poor weight loss. Third, to diagnose and treat post-surgery mental conditions associated with poor quality of life. Future research should focus on post-surgery quality of life, adherence to behavioral guidelines, risk of suicide, and prevalence of psychological disturbances and mental disorders.
