Carrying extra weight can affect your health in many ways, including increasing your risk for health conditions like heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and sleep apnea.

When you have two or more ongoing health condition, your care team may call these “comorbidities.”

Comorbidities can look like:

• Respiratory conditions – Obstructive sleep apnea, obesity hypoventilation syndrome (low blood oxygen), asthma/reactive airway disease
• Heart conditions – High blood pressure, coronary artery disease (atherosclerosis), heart failure
• Abdominal conditions – Gallbladder disease, GERD (recurrent heartburn), recurrent hernias, fatty liver
• Endocrine conditions – Diabetes, hirsutism (excessive body hair), hyperlipidemia, hypercholesterolemia
• Urinary and reproductive conditions – Frequent urinary tract infections (UTIs), stress urinary incontinence, menstrual irregularity or infertility
• Musculoskeletal conditions – Degeneration of knees and hips, herniated discs, chronic low-back pain
• Skin conditions – Multiple disorders, most related to diabetes and yeast infections between skin folds
• Cancer – Breast, uterine, prostate, renal, colon, pancreatic, gastric, gallbladder, and endometrium

Comorbidities can affect people at any weight. However, as weight increases, they may develop sooner and become more serious over time.

For example, men ages 25-35 who are morbidly obese are 12 times more likely to die prematurely compared to men of the same age whose weights are within the normal range.

In general, a person is considered morbidly obese if they weigh 100 pounds or more over their ideal body weight.

A more exact and widely accepted way to define morbid obesity is to use the body mass index (BMI) formula:

Weight (kg)/Height (m2) = BMI

A BMI of 40 or more is considered morbidly obese.

Morbid obesity is a chronic condition that is very difficult to treat. With the right support, weight-loss surgery and a comprehensive weight management program can help improve many of these conditions and support better long-term health.

Bariatric surgery is an option for people who are morbidly obese and for people with a BMI of 35-40 who have life-threatening cardiopulmonary problems or diabetes.

Just like other treatments for obesity, the success of bariatric surgery depends mainly on motivation and behavior.

For nearly all people with morbid obesity, bariatric surgery is the standard of care. It offers the best option for long-term weight control when other medically supervised treatments have failed. One of the most popular and successful surgical approaches is the Roux-en-Y gastric bypass.

Gastric bypass surgery is a time-tested operation. It has been endorsed by a 1991 consensus panel of the National Institute of Health (NIH) as the only effective means of inducing significant long-term weight loss for the vast majority of patients with morbid obesity.