The Fifth IFSO Global Registry Report (2019) has been released at the XXIV World Congress of the International Federation for the Surgery of Obesity and Metabolic Disorders (IFSO) in Madrid, Spain. Published by Dendrite Clinical Systems, under the auspices of the IFSO, the publication reports data from more than 60 countries on over 833,000 operations including baseline obesity-related disease, operation types, operative outcomes and disease status after bariatric surgery.

The report is the culmination of years of research and analyses from the IFSO Global Registry Project, which was established in January 2014 to demonstrate that it is possible to merge and analyse bariatric and metabolic surgical data from different countries and centres.

“It has been very gratifying to see the Dendrite/IFSO Global Registry grow from its early beginnings to the substantial data and information resource it is today” said Dr Peter Walton, Managing Director of Dendrite Clinical Systems. “I would like to thank all the contributors for submitting their data and we look forward to working with IFSO and its members in producing additional reports over the next few years, which we hope will advance the status and acceptability of bariatric and metabolic surgery worldwide, helping promote an increase in bariatric and metabolic surgery provision.”

Data collection

Data collection for the Global IFSO Registry was facilitated via Dendrite’s two hybrid data entry portals for online electronic submission:

• "On-line data entry" is an online database portal accessible over the Internet that enables surgeons/data managers to enter cases (with anonymised patient identifiers) using a simple on-line data form with just 4 pages of questions (typically takes just 3-4 minutes to complete per patient record).
• "IFSO Upload-My-Data" web portal is a proven interface designed to enable a community of surgeons or physicians to create a national or international database; even if there are different database systems at the local level, the data from each can be integrated into the central, merged registry. The platform has been successfully utilised in a number of other national and international registries (for cardiac surgery, thoracic surgery) and has been specifically tailored for the IFSO project to enable both individual centres and national registries to submit data in batches on-line.

This latest report includes 833,687 operation records from over 1,000 hospital across five continents, and has detailed information on:

• 294,530 Roux en Y gastric bypass operations (35.3% of all operation records submitted)
• 391,423 sleeve gastrectomy procedures (47.0%)
• 70,085 gastric banding procedures (8.4%); and
• 30,914 one anastomosis gastric bypass procedures (3.7%)

“Real and true data is the only way for convincing our peer specialties, governments, insurers, health care companies and the general community about the benefits of bariatric / metabolic surgery.  This is part of IFSO’s mission in establishing universal standards of care for the treatment of individuals with chronic adiposity-based disease,” said IFSO President, Professor Almino Ramos. “We believe that this Registry initiative is an important part of the IFSO global response to the adiposity epidemic, and we would like to encourage all our members and national societies to actively participate and join us in the next edition.”

The Global IFSO Registry Project was headed by Almino Ramos (Brazil), Lillian Kow (Australia), Wendy Brown (Australia), John Dixon (Australia), Richard Welbourn (UK), Peter Walton and Robin Kinsman (Dendrite Clinical Systems Ltd, UK).

If you are interested in participating in the Sixth IFSO Global Registry Report, please email: ifsoregistry@e-dendrite.com for more information.