PREGNANCY WITH THE LAP-BAND®: TRANSCRIPTION
DR. RACHAEL KEILIN: One of the things that we like about the Lap-Band® is that it’s uniquely adjustable to whomever we’re doing it for. Whether you’re a younger person – a lot of our patients happen to be women, a lot of whom are still kind of in the timeframe where they’re trying to have kids – and, unfortunately, being overweight is associated with having fertility problems.
It’s actually something that we warn a lot of our patients about, that the first year, when you’ve lost a lot of weight, you may think you have fertility problems – you may not six months later [laughs]. And we’ve had a couple times where people called to say “I think my Band’s too tight, I’ve been throwing up,” and they call back a couple hours later to say “Scratch that” [laughs].
In a situation where you might be facing a pregnancy, and breastfeeding, and trying to take care of young children after that, the Lap-Band is ideally suited for someone like that, where you can actually adjust the Band down, so that you can eat more, so that you can get sort of bigger nutrition that you need during pregnancy, and during breastfeeding, and then adjust it back once pregnancy and breastfeeding’s over.
I think for older people, it’s important, because, if you’re on a lot of different medications, which may come off more slowly than it might in a younger person, you want to be able to adjust the Band to where you can take medications, and not have to worry about what the absorption of those medications might be if you kind of rearrange the plumbing with some of the other operations.
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February 23rd, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Studies have shown that excess weight during pregnancy increases the risk for complications during pregnancy. We are happy to see several of our patients safely lose weight with the LapBand and go on to have healthy pregnancies.