Obesity surgery reverses diabetes in teens

New York, United States, December 28: A small study suggests that the surgery for obesity and weight loss in teens can reverse diabetes, just as it does in adults.

In the past, many studies have been done on adults about the diabetes benefits of obesity surgery but Dr. Thomas Inge, a pediatric surgeon at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, and his colleagues wanted to find out the effect of weight loss surgery in diabetic adolescents.

For their study, the researchers followed 78 obese teens with diabetes. Among these study participants, 11 teens, ages 13 to 21, were extremely obese, weighing 250 to 403 pounds. They had gastricdefine bypass surgery i.e. operation to reduce severe accumulation of excess weight as fatty tissue, at five different medical centers. The remaining 67 teens were under medical supervision in Cincinnati Children's Hospital.

After one year of surgery, it was found that all the 11 teens reported weight loss of about 72 and 218 pounds.

The study author Thomas Inge, associate professor of surgery and pediatrics, and surgical director of the Surgical Weight Loss Program for Teens at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, said that 10 out of 11 surgery participants had stopped taking medication for type 2 diabetesdefine.

On the contrary, the patients living in Cincinnati Children's Hospital, who did not have surgery, still suffered from diabetes.

Thomas Inge said, "The remarkable thing is that the teens who underwent these procedures did not have any major complications." He added that the surgery provided many benefits like normal blood glucose and insulindefine levels, improvement in blood pressure and Cholesterol.

The researchers said that they did not find any reason about one surgery patient whose diabetes wasn't reversed even after the surgery. His diabetes was perhaps more advanced that the other teens’, Inge said.

He said that the chances of diabetes reversal are better when the surgery is done soon after diagnosis, as in the case of adults. "We caught the others in early stage of disease," Inge said. "Did we miss the boat on this one?"

The study results are impressive but still many questions remain, including the long-term benefits and risks to teens, says Michael Freemark, chief of pediatric endocrinology and diabetes at Duke University Medical Center. "It's encouraging, but the results should not at this point be applied in the general community," he added.

The results of this study appear in the January issue of Pediatrics, which is released today.