We aimed to assess the association between bariatric surgery and incident Dupuytren's disease (DD) using propensity score-matched cohort studies among Swedish nationwide healthcare registries. Patients aged 30-79 years who underwent bariatric surgery 2006-2019 were matched on their propensity scores, up to two obese bariatric surgery-free (unexposed) patients. We applied Cox proportional hazard regression to calculate hazard ratios (HR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the risk of DD overall, in subgroups of age, sex, bariatric surgery type and duration of follow-up. Among 34,959 bariatric surgery patients and 54,769 propensity score-matched obese patients, the risk of DD was increased in bariatric surgery patients compared with obese unexposed patients (HR 1.30, 95% CI 1.02-1.65), among women (HR 1.36; 1.00-1.84); those undergoing gastric bypass (HR 1.33; 1.04-1.71) and those with >5 years follow-up (HR 1.63; 1.14-2.34). Our results suggest that substantial weight loss is associated with an increased risk of DD in an obese population.Level of evidence: III.
Keywords: Dupuytren’s disease; bariatric surgery; body mass index; cohort study; obesity.