Weight Loss Surgery Can Reverse Diabetes

Gastric bypass patients get sugar under control quickly

April 28, 2011

Research in gastric bypass surgery could lead to new treatments for diabetes.

Doctors often counsel patients with type 2 diabetes to lose weight. It's a proven way to manage the disease and reduce the risk of serious complications. But how you lose weight can make a difference.

Most people lose weight by eating less or exercising more, or both. But in severe cases, doctors sometimes recommend weight loss surgery. In the most common procedure, the surgeon removes part of the stomach and small intestine.

Gastric bypass surgery, as it's called, is highly effective, but weight loss isn't the only benefit.

Doctors who treat diabetes have known that patients who receive the surgery often get their blood sugar under control quickly - even before they lose weight.

Now, researchers think they are starting to understand why.

"What we've shown is that after gastric bypass surgery - that has been shown before actually - the levels of circulating amino acids decreased significantly." says researcher Blandine LaFerrère. "But what's novel here [is] that we did not see that in the diet group, although they lost the same amount of weight."

LaFerrère works at the New York Obesity Nutrition Research Center, at a hospital affiliated with Columbia University.