A 2-year-old child will be the youngest person to ever undergo bariatric surgery.
An infant in Saudi Arabia is the youngest person in the world to ever undergo bariatric surgery, a type of weight loss surgery in which the size of the stomach is reduced, either by a gastric band or by surgically removing part of the stomach.
At just two years old, the little boy clocked in at 73 pounds, with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 41. His parents have also told doctors that he had started suffering from sleep apnea, thus making the surgery necessary for the tot's survival.
The 2-year-old had at first been sent to an endocrinologist when he was a year old, and had weighed 47 pounds. The parents then sought help from doctors who put the 2-year-old on a strict diet for four months, only to have the child return 18 pounds heavier.
When the morbidly obese child developed sleep apnea, in which he would stop breathing while asleep, it became a cause of concern for the parents as well as the doctors. The boy's legs had also started to become bow-shaped, an indication that his bones were being pulled down and bent because of his excessive weight.
The surgery was a success, and the boy has lost 15 percent of his body weight since then, his BMI descending from a morbid 41, to a 24, which is deemed normal for children of his age, his weight dropping from 73 to 53 pounds within two months.
Obesity in children has become a serious issue, with rates of obesity in children increasing rapidly between 1980 and 2010. 10% of all the children in the world are obese or overweight, and the condition causes a countless many health risks, and early death.
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