A new study has indicated that an obesity surgery could help to cure diabetes. This new study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The Australian researchers found that patients who had undergone the surgery to reduce the size of their stomachs were five times more likely to see their diabetes disappear over the next two years, compared with patients who had standard diabetes care.
According to the study’s lead author, Dr. John Dixon of Monash University Medical School in Melbourne, Australia, “It is the best therapy for diabetes that we have today and it’s very low risk.”
For the study, Dixon and his colleagues studied around 60 obese people with a BMI greater than 30 but less than 40. All the patients were obese and had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes during the past two years, and their average age was 47.
Half of these patients were given gastric band surgery and the other group underwent the normal weight-loss treatments. The team wanted to see if the surgically induced weight loss could be an effective treatment for type 2 diabetes.
The 73% of patients who were given gastric band surgery found their diabetes was in remission two years after the surgery. For those given normal weight-loss treatments, only 13 percent were able to send the disease into remission.
Besides, those who were given gastric band surgery lost 20.7% of their weight after two years compared with less than 1.7% for those given normal weight-loss therapies.
“An important finding of this study is that degree of weight loss, not the method, appears to be the major driver of glycaemic improvement and diabetes in remission in obese participants,. This has important implications, as it suggests that intensive weight-loss therapy may be a more effective first step in the management of diabetes than simple lifestyle change,” said Dixon.