Type 2 diabetes patients who are obese may be benefited by undergoing weight loss surgery, according to a new study by researchers at the Monash University in Melbourne. Obese diabetic patients who underwent weight loss surgery were found to be five times more likely to gain control over their condition as opposed to people who did not go for the surgery.
The study involved 60 obese patients with type 2 diabetes. Lead researcher Dr John Dixon and colleagues set out to analyze the benefits of stomach banding surgery on type 2 diabetes. All participants in the study had a body mass index greater than 30, but lower than 40. Any person having a BMI of over 30 is considered to be clinically obese.
The participants were either allocated to the surgery group or the conventional therapy group, which stressed on diet and lifestyle changes. Overall 26 study participants or 43 percent experienced remission from diabetes at the end of two years.
However 73 percent or 22 of the 30 in the surgery group experienced remission as compared to 13 percent or 4 out of 30 people in the conventional-therapy group. The surgery group also had a 20.7 percent weight loss as compared to the 1.7 percent achieved over two years by the conventional-therapy group.
“After 2 years, the surgical group displayed a 5 times higher remission rate and 4 times greater reduction in HbA1C values than the conventional-therapy group,” the authors write. HbA1c values are used to assess glucose concentrations in plasma and are a primary tool to measure disease progression.
“An important finding of this study is that degree of weight loss, not the method, appears to be the major driver of glycemic improvement and diabetes remission in obese participants," the authors conclude in their report, which appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
