Allergan Inc., producers of the Lap-Band gastric band, is lobbying the FDA to allow them to target teenagers as young as 14 years of age as customers for their weight-loss surgeries. While health experts approve of the device as a last resort for morbidly obese patients, they feel reluctant to prescribe gastric bands to teenager because of serious complications involving the surgery as well as unsure long-term effects.

The company declared that they were seeing a `significant need’ for teenager to have gastric bands fitted in order to prevent life-threatening diseases in young adults.

“It's hard to imagine taking a device and putting it around the stomach and giving it a warranty for 50 or 60 years”, said head of adolescent bariatric surgery at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, Mary Brandt. Because the operation has to be carried out under general anesthesia, serious complications can and have occurred. Brandt added that she would recommend gastric bypasses that remove parts of the stomach but do not introduce a foreign object to the body, as a last option for severely overweight teenagers.

President of the National Research Centre for Women and Families Diana Zuckerman added that she was concerned that an FDA approval would send the wrong signal out to teenager, suggesting that gastric bands were a `safe way to lose weight’.

Lap-Band accounts for 5% of Allergan Inc.’s annual revenue of almost US$ 5 million. In Febuary, the company convinced FDA officials to lower the weight of adults eligible for the surgery by an average of 30-40 pounds. Currently, every third child in the USA is overweight.