Bariatric Surgery Cuts Type 2 Diabetes, Studies Find
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Jeffrey Hamilton/Lifesize/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — Type 2 diabetes, which affects nearly 26 million Americans, may have met its match.
The results of two separate trials published Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine showed for the first time that bariatric surgery can lower blood sugar levels immediately in patients with type 2 diabetes, even before the weight comes off. The surgery limits the amount of food a person can eat, and the amount of calories they absorb.
“Bariatric surgery should not be considered just weight-loss surgery,” said study author Dr. Francesco Rubino of Weill Medical College of Cornell University, “but a means to treat diabetes and metabolic disease.”
Rubino and co-authors at the Catholic University in Rome enrolled obese patients to undergo either intense drug therapy for their diabetes or bariatric surgery. Of patients who had Roux-En-Y surgery, the most common type of bariatric surgery in the United States, 75 percent showed no evidence of diabetes and were off their medications. The improvement started 15 days after surgery. No one in the drug treatment group was free of diabetes.
A similar study from the Cleveland Clinic found that 42 percent of patients who underwent gastric bypass surgery showed no evidence of diabetes one year later, compared with 12 percent of patients who received drug therapy.
“For about a century, we have been treating diabetes with pills and injections, and this is one of the first studies to show that surgical therapy may, at least in some patients, be much more effective than the polypharmacy approach to treating this disease,” said study author Dr. Philip Schauer at the Cleveland Clinic Bariatric and Metabolic Institute.
The surgery also triggered a drop in triglyceride levels, and levels of good cholesterol went up.
“Currently less than 2 percent of patients are treated with bariatric or metabolic surgery,” said Dr. Joel Zonszein, director of the Clinical Diabetes Center at the University Hospital of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who was not involved in the studies. “Many more people can benefit.”
As to whether bariatric surgery is the answer, more research into its cost-effectiveness is needed.
“Given that there are millions of obese people with diabetes, it is physically and economically impractical to provide this technology for all,” said Dr. Gerald Bernstein, director of the Diabetes Management Program at the Friedman Diabetes Institute at New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center.
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio