"The effective treatments for severe obesity in adolescents are really just one: That is bariatric surgery," says Dr. Thomas Inge, a director of adolescent bariatric surgery at Children's Hospital Colorado [and CU School of Medicine professor] and a lead scientist on a multiyear National Institutes of Health study tracking young bariatric patients. "The unwritten story here is the remarkable disparity between the number of teenagers that are eligible for the surgery versus the number that are getting it."