A study by researchers at Stanford University Medical Center has found that a popular weight-loss operation is safer and reduces 
hospital bills when done with minimally invasive techniques rather than open surgery, which requires a large abdominal incision.
The authors say that, to their knowledge, this is the first time the open and minimally invasive approaches have been compared at a national level. “There have been single-center randomized trials that support the greater safety and efficacy of the minimally invasive approach, but what our study does is to confirm that those results are actually occurring in practice at hospitals and academic medical centers across the country,” said John Morton, MD, MPH, associate professor of surgery and senior author of the study, which is published online in the Archives of Surgery.
More informatioThe patients who underwent the laparoscopic, or minimally invasive, procedure had lower mortality rates, lower complication rates, shorter hospital stays and lower hospital charges compared with those who underwent open surgery, even after adjusting for differences in the patients’ socioeconomic levels and co-morbidities, the study reports.