A large-sale study conducted in UK to see the impact of weight-loss surgery has informed a huge diminution in Type 2 diabetes and other health related problems. The study reported the reduction in cases of Type 2 diabetes by fifty percent, a year after surgery and patients lost about sixty percent of their excessive weight.
The study analysis included more than seven thousand weight-loss surgeries carried out over the period of two years. According to the report by the National Bariatric Surgery Registry, the world has been overwhelmed by epidemic of obesity. There are about one million people in UK who could benefit from bariatric surgery.
The bariatric surgery includes gastric bands and gastric bypasses. The detailed one year follow up statistics of more than fourteen hundred weight-loss surgeries were also included in the report. Among those, three hundred and eighty patients had Type 2 diabetes prior to the surgery, while one year after the surgery that figure had dropped nearly to two hundred.
There were also noted improvements in patients’ blood pressure and everyday tasks like climbing stairs. The treatment should be made more extensively accessible on the NHS, explained Alberic Fiennes, a bariatric surgeon and chairman of the NBSR Data Committee. The move toward that limits treatment to a portion of those who would benefit is one which the NHS will rue in years to come.
Those patients become an untenable burden on the health service. The preventative strategy alone has proved ineffective. There are at least two generations of morbidly obese patients who are now presenting with diabetes, stroke, heart disease and cancer for whom preventative measures are utterly irrelevant, added Dr Fiennes.
The people, who were obese, first should try to lose weight through diet and lifestyle changes. The bariatric surgery should only be used a substitute treatment to help people lose weight if all other efforts have been ineffective and their diabetes remain poorly controlled, stressed Prof Sir George Alberti, the chairman of the charity Diabetes UK.