Comment on: Chronic abdominal pain and quality of life after Roux-en-Y gastric bypass and sleeve gastrectomy – a cross-cohort analysis of two prospective longitudinal observational studies

I would like to congratulate the authors on their article “Chronic Abdominal Pain and Quality of Life After Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass and Sleeve Gastrectomy – a Cross-Cohort Analysis of Two Prospective Longitudinal Observational Studies” [ ]. In this study from Norway, the authors compared the occurrence of chronic abdominal pain (CAP) in patients that underwent laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) to patients who underwent sleeve gastrectomy (SG). There were 2 different institutions involved in the study. The authors should be commended on their high follow-up rate of 85% at 2 years because this is rarely seen in the United States. They found that in patients undergoing RYGB, CAP was present in 28 of 236 (11.9%) patients at baseline and in 60 of 209 (28.7%) patients at follow-up (P < .001). For SG patients, 2 of 223 (14.3%) had baseline CAP and 50 of 186 (26.9%) had CAP at follow-up (P < .001). The authors concluded that there was an increase in CAP after RYGB and SG, with SG patients having an increase in reflux-related symptoms and RYGB patients having more diarrhea and indigestion symptoms. I also found it interesting that roughly half of the long-term complications listed were gallbladder related. Although symptomatic gallstones are technically a complication, they are usually easily handled laparoscopically, and I would consider a laparoscopic cholecystectomy almost as a health maintenance issue given the high incidence in the population of patients with obesity.