The International Bariatric Surgery Registry (IBSR)

The IBSR was established in 1986 as the National Bariatric Surgery Registry (NBSR) to standardize data collection and analysis of results for surgical treatment of obesity.  In 1996, the NBSR was renamed the IBSR due to international interest and support.

IBSR surgeon members collect data using software developed by The IBSR.  The software contains programming for local analysis and graphing.  Data contributors send their data to the IBSR office where it is pooled with other IBSR data sets for analyses.  Annual reports provide participating surgeons with confidential comparisons of their results with the pooled results from all participants.  The quarterly IBSR NEWSLETTER contains both patient management and data management sections (www.healthcare.uiowa.edu/Surgery/ibsr).

Standardized data collection is performed using IBSR personal computer software (IBSR 1.0).  Each contributing site is responsible for data entry and verification of data.  Instruction for data collection is provided via the IBSR Data Base Instruction Manual and software support.

Data is received for analysis at the IBSR central office on floppy diskette in electronically compiled files.  It is then converted to ASCII format and merged into the pooled data set on a Dell personal computer using Microsoft Access (v 2.0).  PC SAS (v 8.2) is used to analyze the data for special studies IBSR Reports.

Special studies have resulted in a number of reports regarding clinical and analytic studies.  In 1991, the IBSR presented research on Perioperative Risk at a National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Conference on Surgical Treatment of Severe Obesity.  Twenty articles or abstracts have been published in refereed journals based on IBSR information.  The IBSR historical data set currently contains information for over 39,781 patients from 84 data contributor sites representing 117 surgeons.

KR  IBSR 10-08-2004