Food addiction and quality of life in patients with bariatric surgery

Especially during the last decades, obesity is seen more frequently and has become an epidemic all around the world. It prevails as a health problem and day by day more emphasis has been given to it. Bariatric surgery leads to striking results in weight loss but post-surgery complications may have impacts on quality of life in the long-term. The research is designed as a cross-sectional research to determine food addiction and quality of life of those who had surgery. After having ethics committee approval,the research is done with the patients who had their surgeries in a private clinic between December 2017 and June 2018 in Ankara. Population and sample of the research consists of 80 patients who voluntarily applied for bariatric surgery in a private clinic in Ankara and had their surgeries at least 3 months ago. In the research, in order to collect data, "Socio-Demographic Characteristics Diagnosis Form" prepared by the researcher, "Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS), and "SF 36 Quality of Life Scale" were used. Data was obtained through phone calls with patients. In order to do the statistical analysis of the data IBM SPSS Statistics 18 (IBM SPSS, Turkey) program was used. The study data was evaluated by using descriptive statistics methods (average, standard deviation, frequency, percentile) t test, Pearson correlation and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The participants consist of 71,3 % of women, 40 % people of 31-40 age, 70 % with bachelor's degree and % 52,5 people with average weight. 66,7 % of the participants stated that they had had diabetics and insulin resistance illness, but 95 % of them said that their diseases discontinued. 40 % of participants stated that they experienced health problems after surgery. When the food addiction of the participants is examined, it was seen that none of them is food addicted. Quality of Life Scale's sub-divisions are scored based on the responses of participants and evaluated out of 100. Average of physical functioning sub-division was found as 94,5; average of role limitations due to physical health was found as 66,88; average of role limitations due to emotional problems was found as 59,58; average of energy/fatigue was found as 69,81; average of emotional well-being was found as 80,15; average of social functioning was found as 80,2; average of pain sub-division was found was 2,63 and average of general health sub-division was found as 81,94. Conclusion: Relationship between the sub-divisions of quality of life scale and sub-divisions of Yale food addiction was examined and it was founded that (a) there is only weak positive relation between subdivision of "Use continues despite knowledge of adverse consequences" and role limitations due to physical health and (b) weak negative relation with social functioning. It is seen that patients who had bariatric surgery are affected positively after their surgery in terms of their quality of life and they are not food addicted. We can state that weight loss is a factor that has an impact on quality of life. Keywords: Obesity, bariatric surgery, food addiction, quality of life.