Description

Dr. Dahiya discusses if women can become pregnant after having weight loss surgery and describes the connection between bariatric surgery and fertility.

Transcript

The Likelihood of Pregnancy After Weight Loss Surgery It’s known to us, the bariatric surgeons, that whether it’s a man or a woman, the hormones that have the sex drive–the estrogens in the case of a woman, and testosterone in case of man--they are all depressed to pretty low levels, and they all are elevated after the surgery. So, actually we’ve had several patients that we have caught into it that “Well, you know, I couldn’t get pregnant before and all of a sudden how come…you know,” even though we have done that explaining before. So it does increase the fertility in men, sex drive in both the male and female. Eighteen to 24 months we try to advice, "please don’t go and conceive. It could be hazardous to the child. You do need more nutrition and so forth. After that, your chance of having any abnormality and all that are just the same as you would have been otherwise, and that’s why the advice is given that for the first 18 to 24 months, please use contraceptive for the sake of the baby so that you can lower the chances of the abnormality. And sex drive–it also is half mental. So if you are depressed all the time, that’s not going to work either. So it takes sort of the depression also at the same time, along with the hormones. So, all of that is a wonderful positive impact.