Diabetes patients often gain better control of their disease through healthy lifestyle choices. But when diet and exercise aren’t enough, weight loss surgery may do the trick, especially for obese patients.
Modified weight loss surgery may reverse type 2 diabetes, especially among patients who have had diabetes for less than 10 years.
Ask your doctor if surgery is the right diabetes treatment for you.
Sleeve gastrectomy is a type of modified weight loss surgery, or bariatric surgery. It is a less extreme than gastric bypass surgery, the most common form of weight loss surgery. Sleeve gastrectomy reduces the amount of food that can fit in the stomach. It has been shown to reverse or improve type 2 diabetes in obese patients.
In some cases, the surgery is successful in diabetes patients who are not obese.
From their recent research, Kirtikuar Modi, MD, of Medwin Hospital in Hyderabad, India, and colleagues found that 20 out of 43 patients no longer had type 2 diabetes after undergoing sleeve gastrectomy.
The patients had sleeve gastrectomy with ileal interposition – a type of sleeve gastrectomy in which part of the small intestine is moved closer to the stomach.
At the beginning of the study, all patients had poorly controlled diabetes.
After the surgery, the 23 patients who still had diabetes needed fewer diabetes drugs or smaller doses of their drugs.