Posted On : December 26, 2011 This study comes from Dr. Östlund at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery of the Stockholm.  He studied over 12,000 patients that had either a Gastric bypass or gastric restrictive procedure, and looked at their follow up data for an average of 8.9 years. There were more than 122,000 data points matched for a number of variables, including age, gender, and type of procedure. “…Patients undergoing gastric bypass were 2.3 times more likely than those receiving banding procedures to get inpatient treatment for alcohol related diagnosis.” The significance of this study, as pointed out by the authors, is that the data is very reliable because the majority of patients could be followed up over a very long period of time.