We are no longer accepting cases regarding these products.  Due to a terrible Supreme Court ruling, consumers injured by this product are no longer permitted to sue the manufacturers of this device.  We wish we could help, but the Supreme Court has taken the rights of citizens away to protect the profits of medical device manufacturers.  For more information, please read the following New York Times article entitled “Medical Device Ruling Redraws Lines on Lawsuits.“

In 2013, another article by PE O’Brien was published concerning the safety of laparoscopically-inserted gastric banding systems used in obesity reduction. The article, published in Annals of Surgery was titled “Long-term outcomes after bariatric surgery: fifteen-year follow-up of adjustable gastric banding and a systematic review of the bariatric surgical literature.”.

Near the outset of their piece, the O’Brien team writes, “Because obesity is a chronic disease, any proposed obesity treatment should be expected to demonstrate long-term durability to be considered effective. Yet for bariatric surgery, few long-term weight loss data are available. We report our 15-year follow-up data after LAGB and provide a systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature for weight loss at 10 years or more after bariatric surgical procedures.”

For clarity, “LAGB” stands for laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding.  One of the most commonly-used such devices is the LAP-BAND, manufactured by Allergan.

Using a large medical database for these gastric banding systems called LapBase, this team identified 3,227 patients (mean age, BMI – 47, 43.8) who underwent LAGB between September 1994 and December 2011.  Of these patients, just over 700 “completed at least 10 years of follow-up.”

While there was “47.1% of excess weight loss … for all patients who were at or beyond 10 years follow up”, “Revisional procedures were performed for proximal enlargement (26%), erosion (3.4%), and port and tubing problems (21%).”

Sadly, Allergan reports that its LAP-BAND will only result in erosion in 1.33% and less than one percent of LAP-BAND uses will result in port problems.  Due to such dramatic discrepancies between reported rates of adverse events by Allergan and those observed by independent researchers, a number of Allergan LAP-BAND lawsuits have been filed.

Our Allergan LAP-BAND Lawsuit Information page is a great place to start if you have any questions about the Allergan LAP-BAND.