Obesity is a difficult to treat multi-problematic disease.
Bariatric surgery (BS) has been regarded as the most effective therapeutic option, however the outcomes strongly depend on baseline conditions and further behavioural modifications. Our aim was to assess the characteristics of severely obese patients seeking BS in a Public Health Service in Italy. Socio-demographic characteristics, eating habits and the presence of stressful situations associated to weight increase, as well as
psychiatric disorders of 111 outpatients attending our BS Program were assessed. Twenty-seven percent of patients have familiar history of
obesity (FHO). Differences between patients having or not having a FHO were found for several psychiatric conditions, including lower Bulimic symptoms (p=0.025) and lower use of Alcohol (p=0.045). A total of 28.8% of the participants reported a BED; those patients do not differ in BMI (p=0.437) from non-BED patients but had higher psychological disorders associated to
eating disorder, as for example Bulimic symptoms (p=0.000), higher
BES scores (p=0.000) and psychological distress, such as Depression (p=0.000). Nearly 50% of patients had any
psychiatric disorders and depression was the most common disturbance (32.4%);
anxiety disorder was present in 15.3% of patients. Moreover, patients who have disclosed traumatic episodes (11.7%) presented higher distress associated to
eating disorder variables, such as
BES (p=0.001) and EDI-2 BU scores (p=0.000) and presence of BED (p=0.001), and women are more likely to be in this group (p=0.043). Our report proposes that multiple causative factors play a role in
obesity, and we need to take them all into account to plan a comprehensive pre- and post-surgical treatment plan.