The Centre for Adolescent Health was involved in the first randomised controlled trial of ‘lapbanding’  in severely obese adolescents that was undertaken because of the failure of current treatment approaches in the most severely affected by obesity. This trial was funded by the Australian NHMRC and published last year in the highly prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Read the article by Prof Susan Saywer in the JAMA: Too big to swallow

Read the JAMA editorial by E Livingston MD : Surgical Treatment of Obesity in Adolescents. Feb 10 2010

Professor Sawyer, Director of the Centre for Adolescent Health, one of the chief investigators in the trial, has now published a reflective article in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health based on her experiences running this trial, which compared laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding to an intensive behaviourally-based intervention in adolescents with severe obesity. During this trial, a number of moral and ethical concerns were articulated by various Australian colleagues. In the article, Professor Sawyer groups these concerns into five responses (‘preventers’, ‘druggies’, ‘deferrers’, ‘slippery slopers’ and ‘simplifiers’). She suggests that while these raise important issues, such responses also deflect attention from the urgent need to develop and test new treatments for the most severely obese adolescents, a field that she argues continues to be hampered by the stigma of obesity.