The gastric sleeve, also known as a laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy used to be the first part of a two-stage operation, the duodenal switch, a malabsorptive operation, which was usually reserved for patients with very high body mass indexes, greater than 60 kg/m2. But with time, it became clear that many patients had successful, sustained weight loss, with the gastric sleeve alone.

Increasingly surgeons recognised the sleeve’s reliability and increasing numbers of patients chose the sleeve over the gastric bypass recognising it was easier to live with in the longer-term. The sleeve gastrectomy became increasingly popular, from the early 2010s onwards. Since then, more and more long-term outcome studies have been published, supporting its effectiveness as a weight loss operation and also a metabolic operation for illnesses such as diabetes.