Stomach-banding surgery for weight loss cured nearly three-quarters of obese patients with Type 2 diabetes, five times as many as could be cured by medications, dieting and lifestyle changes, Australian researchers reported today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. In the first head-to-head comparison of banding and conventional weight-loss techniques, physician obesity specialist John B. Dixon of Monash University in Melbourne and his colleagues found that patients receiving the band lost an average of 20.7% of their body weight, while those on a medically supervised diet lost 1.3%. Among those who lost at least 10% of their body weight — a number that included only one of those on the medically supervised diet — 87% were able to stop taking all diabetes medications within a year. Among those on the diet who did not lose that much, only 12% were able to stop taking medications, and all of them had very mild cases of diabetes to begin with. Other studies have shown that the more invasive form of bariatric surgery, called a gastric bypass, produces an even bigger weight loss and cures Type 2 diabetes in 80% to 85% of patients, often within days of the surgery.
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