Stanford University researchers analyzed data on nearly 85,000 hospital admissions for spinal fusions in California between the years 2007 and 2008 and compared trends of the morbidly obese patients in that data — 2 percent of the people undergoing spine fusions — to the rest of the patient population undergoing that surgery.
The results showed that nearly 14 percent of morbidly obese patients — people with a body mass index of 40 or more — had complications stemming from the fusion compared to 7 percent of patients not morbidly obese. Moreover, morbidly obese patients stayed at the hospital an average of one and a half more days following surgery, and faced higher hospital costs ($109,000 versus $85,000 on average) because of that.
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