Doctors do not know yet what is the probability that the bones of patients enough to impair fracture in the years after the operation, but one of the first attempts to determine duplicate operations suggests that risk and that patients are more likely to fracture a hand or foot.

The Mayo Clinic findings are surprising and carry out more research to determine whether this link is real, but as bariatric surgery flourishes and even the teens in their formative years of trying bone, experts say it is urgent to discover the long term side effects and how to counter them.

The mere consumption of calcium supplements may not be enough.

”These procedures are being sold as a panacea, ”warned last week Dr. Silverberg Shonni Joy Columbia University at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society, where the relationship between fat and bone was the central theme. ”It is important to find the answers to these questions,”he said.

Here’s the irony: In fact, it seems that obesity protects against osteoporosis, the weakening of the bones, possibly the only positive thing that any doctor would say the excess fat.

Begin”better than most of us,”she said in bone metabolism at the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Jackie Clowes. So the big question is whether we really end up with weaker bones or simply going through a transition period in which their bones adapt to their new body size.

Some 15 million people in America are considered extremely obese, with overweight by 45 kilograms (100 pounds) or more.

Diet alone is not sufficient antidote against diabetes and other health problems, so that surgery is becoming the preferred treatment, since the clips on the stomach called gastric bypass to other less invasive methods. Patients tend to lose 15% to 25% of their original weight and improves the diabetes.

Over one million 200 thousand U.S. patients have undergone surgery in the last decade and only 220 thousand last year, according to the American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery.