Personality and cognitive findings among patients electing gastroplasty for morbid obesity

This study examined the personality and cognitive characteristics of morbidly obese patients seeking gastroplasty. Rather than seeking “modal” psychological characteristics for the group as a whole, this investigation attempted to identify potentially relevant sources of variability that might serve as psychological markers for later identifying patients at risk for poor surgical outcome. Results indicate that while the patients share many life concerns and normal-range personality characteristics, they are quite heterogenous in terms of psychopathological features, with 72% of the patients falling into one of three modal personality types on the MMPI. Cognitively, the patients' general intellectual abilities were normally distributed, and a substantial portion of the sample evidenced significant deficits in new concept formation and capacity to follow sequential procedures in a prescribed manner, abilities that seem, at face value, to be related to issues of compliance and ability to make lifestyle changes. The possibility of generating multivariate templates associated with different surgical outcomes from this data is discussed.