April 1, 2014
NBC Nightly News (3/31, story 10, 2:55, Williams) reported that “researchers have found that weight loss surgery for” patients with type 2 diabetes “can be more effective than taking medication in beating this disease.”
USA Today (4/1, Weintraub) reports that for the study, presented at the American College of Cardiology meeting and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, investigators “followed 150 patients, one-third of whom were treated for their diabetes with medication and lifestyle changes alone; one-third who also got gastric bypass surgery; and one-third who had a different type of bariatric surgery called a sleeve gastrectomy.” Study participants “were overweight or mildly obese and had diabetes that was not well controlled by medication.”
The Los Angeles Times (4/1, Healy) reports that the researchers found that “bariatric surgery did more to improve symptoms of diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol after three years than intensive treatment with drugs alone.” Meanwhile, those who underwent “sleeve gastrectomy also lost more weight, had better kidney function and saw greater improvements in their quality of life than their counterparts who did not” undergo surgery.
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On average, patients lost an additional 57 lbs when bariatric surgery was added to conventional nonsurgical approaches to weight loss. Patients who had surgery were more than five times as likely to have remission of diabetes and twice as likely to have remission of metabolic syndrome, as compared with patients who were treated only with nonsurgical interventions.