The first Diabetes Surgery Summit (DSS), an international conference held at the Catholic University of Rome, Italy, witnessed an audience of more than 50 scientific and medical experts, to mutually define and agree on a set of guidelines to guide the use and study of gastrointestinal surgery to treat type II diabetes. A consensus of 50 medical experts, in a first of its kind summit, pronounced surgery to be an acceptable and effective treatment for type II diabetes, bringing the procedure a significant step closer to wider use.
It is a well known f
act that obesity promotes insulin resistance, thereby causing diabetes. For such obese patients, bariatric surgery has been proven to reduce diabetes. The present consensus is based on these studies which prove efficacy of bariatric surgery to treat type II diabetes obese patients, sometimes within weeks or even days, well before the patients have lost a significant amount of body weight.
According to Dr. Francesco Rubino, director of the gastrointestinal metabolic surgery program at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center and associate professor of surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College, removing part of the small intestine below the stomach (duodenum or jejunum) and later inserting a tube in this area to circumvent passage of food directly into the intestine, reverses diabetes. This suggests that normal course of food through the stomach triggers a cascade of biochemical reactions that cause diabetes.
The population of GCC countries are especially thought to benefit from this surgery, owing to high incidence of the disease in the Gulf. According to Bakr Nour, MD, professor of surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar and vice chair of surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, “This is very good news for people in Qatar and other Gulf countries where diabetes continues to be a major health concern. It is estimated that 15 to 20% of GCC nationals suffer from diabetes, though many may be unaware that they have it. The disease rates continue to rise both in adults and children, and prevalence among Qatari children has doubled in the past 10 years.”
“While more study has been recommended, consensus about surgery as an effective treatment for select patients with type 2 diabetes means that many more patients will be considered as candidates for the procedure,” says Dr. Nour. “It could mean a dramatic improvement in the quality of life for those patients for whom lifestyle changes and less invasive therapies prove insufficient.”
“Prevention will always be the best strategy to approach the global epidemic of diabetes,” says Dr. Rubino. “But gastrointestinal surgery promises to be an important addition to the treatments available, and its study may also allow us to understand the disease mechanism in depth. We can only prevent what we truly understand.”
Article by Snigdha Taduri for Biomed-ME.