The Challenge
A 28-year-old man from the United Kingdom had struggled with severe obesity for a decade. Weighing 240 kg with a 203 cm waist, he had tried exercise, dieting, and injectable medications without lasting success, and a family history of obesity made weight management harder still. By the time he sought help he needed crutches to walk. Traditional options — sleeve gastrectomy or gastric bypass — meant a major, higher-risk operation that permanently alters the digestive tract.
The Solution
At Beijing United Family Hospital's minimally invasive digestive center, Dr. Li Wen offered a different path: a gastric-bypass (duodenal) stent, a technology developed in China and placed entirely through an endoscope — no incision and no permanent change to the gastrointestinal structure. The stent diverts the path of food through the duodenum, producing a weight-loss effect similar to surgical bypass, but is fully reversible and removable by endoscopy after about three months.
The Procedure
Because of the patient's exceptional weight, a multidisciplinary team planned the case in advance — an individualized anesthesia plan for the anticipated difficult airway and altered drug metabolism, a reinforced operating table to bear the load, and an endoscopy-led imaging strategy (his body composition exceeded the measuring equipment's range, and mobile X-ray imaging would have been unreliable through such thick tissue). The stent was placed precisely at the duodenum in just ten minutes. He was able to take fluids the same day and was discharged after a single night of observation.
The Outcome
At one-week follow-up he had already lost 11 kg. Safe in the recovery room, he invited the surgeon for a photo and sent it straight to his family in the UK. The team emphasized that any weight-loss treatment works best alongside long-term lifestyle change — but for a patient at high surgical risk, the procedure opened a door that a decade of effort had not.
