Intragastric balloon

Abstract

Obesity is a serious, complex disease and both its treatment and management have remained a global medical challenge. It has been proven that obesity reduces the quality of life as well as life expectancy in patients and is associated with numerous comorbidities including but not limited too diabetes mellitus, obstructive sleep apnea, hypertension, lipid disorders, hepatic steatosis, ischemic heart disease, certain cancers amongst other illnesses. One of the endoluminal/endoscopic bariatric therapeutic options for treatment of obesity is space occupying devices, which take form of a temporarily placed prosthetic balloon. The intragastric balloon is one of the earliest devices placed endoscopic as a weight loss intervention and continues to date as the most common endoscopic bariatric procedure performed worldwide, because of this it is the most widely studied of the minimally invasive endoscopic therapies for obesity.