2.3. Participants and Eligibility Criteria
SEVERE OBESITY
The volunteers, clinically stable, were consecutively recruited from the Surgery Unit of Santa Casa de Misericórdia de São Paulo and selected in accordance with the eligibility criteria previously established by the study protocol. Our inclusion criteria allowed patients aged between 18 and 65 years with severe obesity level III (BMI ≥ 40 kg/mWe conducted a sample size calculation based on a previous study by Rafey et al., who identified plasma levels of adiponectin in patients with severe obesity undergoing BS. Considering a margin of error of 0.05 and a significance level of 95%, we determined that 25 patients were required to detect an effect size of 0.95 [