Personal Profile
Background
Mr Roger Ackroyd is a Consultant Surgeon at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and at Thornbury Hospital. He qualified in medicine from Sheffield University in 1989 and trained in surgery in Sheffield and Adelaide, Australia. He took up a consultant appointment in Sheffield in 2001 and specialises in general and upper GI surgery. His clinical interests include oesophago-gastric cancer surgery, laparoscopic surgery, gallstone surgery, hernia surgery and bariatric (weight loss) surgery.
He has a very busy bariatric practice, operating on around 300 patients per year. He has performed more than 5000 obesity operations. He offers all types of obesity surgery, both open and laparoscopic, including revisional surgery. His most common operations are laparoscopic gastric banding, laparoscopic gastric bypass and laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy.
Teaching and Training
He also has an active research programme. He has supervised 12 post-graduate students, all of whom have gained a higher degree (PhD, MD, etc). He has published over 100 peer reviewed papers and presented his work at scientific meetings all over the world.
Mr Ackroyd has been a member of the British Obesity and Metabolic Surgery Society (BOMSS) since it was founded in 2001. During that time he has been on the Council of the Society for 15 years and has been held the positions of Treasurer, Secretary and President.
Obesity
Mr Ackroyd has written the following about Obesity:
"Obesity is an ever increasing problem in the Western World, with huge numbers of men and women in the UK now being classified as either overweight or obese. This is mainly due to modern eating habits and in part due to our sedentary lifestyle. Our size is classified according to body mass index (BMI), where BMI is equal to weight (in kilograms) divided by height (in metres) squared. The normal BMI is 20-25, a BMI over 25 is classed as overweight, over 30 is obese and over 35 is morbidly obese, with a BMI over 50 being categorised as super obese.
Simple dieting and exercise obviously helps but for cases of severe obesity more drastic action is often needed. Surgery is now a tried and tested approach for people with morbid obesity. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommend surgery for people with a BMI of 40 or more (or 35 or more if they have significant comorbidity, eg diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnoea, etc). For people with type 2 diabetes this can go down to a BMI of 30 or more.
Various operations are now performed for obesity, the majority being performed by laparoscopic (key hole) surgery. The commonest procedures performed include laparoscopic gastric banding, laparoscopic gastric bypass and laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy.
The gastric band is the simplest such operation and involves the placement of an inflatable band around the upper part of the stomach to restrict the amount of food that can be ingested. The band can be adjusted by injecting or removing saline from it. The gastric bypass is a bigger operation, which involves dividing the upper stomach to create a small pouch followed by a re-plumbing of the intestines to bypass most of the stomach and upper bowel, leading to a degree of malabsorption. The sleeve gastrectomy is a newer procedure, which is gaining rapidly in popularity, in which approximately three quarters of the stomach is removed, to dramatically reduce the amount of food that can be eaten."
