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Weight-loss surgery could beat diabetes

• by: From correspondents in Chicago
• From: AP
• March 27, 2012 3:00PM

NEW research gives clear proof that weight-loss surgery can reverse and possibly cure diabetes.

Two studies, released today, are the first to compare the benefits of stomach-reducing operations to medicines alone for "diabesity" - Type 2 diabetes brought on by obesity.

Both studies found that surgery helped far more patients achieve normal blood-sugar levels than medicines alone did.

The results were dramatic: Some people were able to stop taking insulin as soon as three days after their operations. Cholesterol and other heart risk factors also greatly improved.

Doctors don't like to say "cure" because they can't promise a disease will never come back. But in one study, most surgery patients were able to stop all diabetes drugs and have their disease stay in remission for at least two years. None of those treated with medicines alone could do that.

"It is a major advance," said Dr John Buse of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a leading diabetes expert who had no role in the studies.

There were signs that the surgery itself - not just weight loss - helps reverse diabetes. Food makes the gut produce hormones to spur insulin, so trimming away part of it surgically may affect those hormones, doctors believe.

Weight-loss surgery "has proven to be a very appropriate and excellent treatment for diabetes", said one study co-leader, Dr Francesco Rubino, chief of diabetes surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

"The most proper name for the surgery would be diabetes surgery."

The studies were published online by the New England Journal of Medicine, and the larger one was presented today at an American College of Cardiology conference in Chicago.

More than a third of American adults are obese, and more than eight per cent have diabetes, a major cause of heart disease, strokes and kidney failure. Between five million and 10 million are like the people in these studies, with both problems.

For a century, doctors have been treating diabetes with pills and insulin, and encouraging weight loss and exercise with limited success. Few very obese people can drop enough weight without surgery, and many of the medicines used to treat diabetes can cause weight gain, making things worse.