Diabetes may be cured with weight-loss surgery

[Hum]

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- There's new evidence that weight-loss surgery can reverse and possibly cure diabetes. Doctors say the operation should be offered sooner to more people with the disease - not just as a last resort.

More than a third of American adults are obese, and more than 8 percent have diabetes, a major cause of heart disease, strokes and kidney failure.

Two studies, released on Monday, compared Type 2 diabetes patients who used medicine alone to those who also had stomach-reducing operations.

Both studies found that surgery helped far more patients reach normal blood-sugar levels than medicine alone. The results were dramatic: Some people were able to stop taking insulin as soon as three days after their operations.

Doctors say this is proof that weight-loss surgery should be an early form of treatment for many diabetics. They aren't saying it's a cure because they can't promise that the disease won't 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.

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.

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

source

[vincent]

Wonder how that'd work for me then, I'm 160, in good shape, but my Type II is genetic....

yea..didn't think so :sleep:

[ILikeTobacco]

really should change the title to Diabetes Type II. only adding to the general populations ignorance about the diseases.

[Vveazel]

really should change the title to Diabetes Type II. only adding to the general populations ignorance about the diseases.

+1.. Highly misleading title and only applies to N. America anyway :rofl:

[Lord Nite]

I know, for a fact, that the gastric bypass surgery did help cure my mom's diabetes.

[Growled Member]

That's fantastic news. That could help so many people.