Surgery to Cure Diabetes?

Namita Nayyar (WF Team)

13 years ago

Surgery to Cure Diabetes?

– Reported April 24, 2012
By: Demetria “Dee” Hobbs, Ivanhoe Health Correspondent

(Ivanhoe Newswire) Globally, more than 180 million people have diabetes; and by the year 2025, the number of diabetic patients is expected to increase by another 200 million. In the United States alone, one in ten healthcare dollars is attributed to diabetes, costing patients and the government more than a hundred billion dollars a year in medical expenditures. Diabetes can only be controlled, it cannot be cured, or can it?

Traditionally, diabetes is often treated with medication, exercise, and insulin shots, but those options only control the disease, not cure it. Surgeons have discovered, while performing gastric bypass surgery (GBP) on their diabetic patients that majority of their patients experienced a remission in their diabetes.

In 1995, researchers conducted a ten year study that included 608 patients having GBP surgery, 167 of which had been diagnosed with diabetes and another 152 had impaired glucose tolerance (IGT). The results showed 83% of their diabetic patients experienced a resolution in their diabetic symptoms and the IGT patients had a 99% resolve.

“Surgery is probably the best way to treat diabetes,” says Dr. Keith Kim, MD, FACS, director of Metabolic Medicine & Surgery Institute at Celebration Health and one of the speakers at the ASPN conference. “Gastric bypass surgery resolves diabetes and improves glucose intolerance,” Dr. Kim adds.

Dr. Kim believes that in the future that there will be more “studies of the mechanisms underlying the surgical resolution of diabetes,” as well as, “a development of surgeries specifically tailored for treating diabetes.”

SOURCE: American Society of Perianesthesia Nurses (ASPN) 31st National Conference, Orlando, FL, April 19, 2012