For Type II Diabetes patients, laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery was once considered too high risk of a surgical procedure. However a new study reports that complication and mortality rates for this surgical procedure are comparable to other safe and commonly performed surgeries in the country.
Researchers from Cleveland Clinic’s Bariatric and Metabolic Institute studied the national database of nearly 66,678 patients with diabetes who had various surgeries from 2007 to 2012. Some of these procedures included appendectomy, hysterectomy, heart surgery, laparoscopic gallbladder surgery and total knee replacement. The study’s researchers compared the complication and mortality rates of these procedures to those of 16,509 patients who had laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery.
During this surgical procedure, surgeons use minimally-invasive techniques in order to reduce the size of the stomach. This allows food to bypass a portion of the small intestine which reduces the amount of food that patients eat at one time and limits absorption overall. The procedure results in dramatic weight loss and major improvement or total remission of their diabetes condition.
The study found that the 30-day complication rate for the gastric bypass surgery was just 3.4, which is almost the same for laparoscopic surgery such as gallbladder surgery. Also hospital stays or readmission rates were comparable to that of a laparoscopic appendectomy surgery. Ultimately gastric bypass patients had better short-term outcomes in all variables compared to laparoscopic colon resection surgery patients.
For many patients with Type II Diabetes, a gastric bypass procedure can have an almost immediate effect on their diabetes symptoms, whether a few hours later or even a few days. Many patients even leave the hospital without having to take their medication. The risk-to-benefit ratio of gastric bypass surgery for diabetes is very favorable as there is significant weight loss and improvement or total remission of diabetes for many patients. Also this early intervention with surgery can also eliminate any need for higher-risk procedures to treat any complication of diabetes such as cardiovascular ones.
Another study by the Cleveland Clinic was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2015. This study found that diabetes remission rates three years after bariatric surgery were 35% compared to 0 for other patients that were treated with just medication. The study, “How Safe is Metabolic/Diabetes Surgery” were presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery and also appeared in the journal, Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism. The study’s researchers believe that the database in their study included only short-term outcomes. They understand that more information and/or studied need to be done on the long-term safety of surgery.
Nearly 78 million adults are obese in American, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. Those with a BMI of over 30 have a 50-100 percent increased risk of premature death compared to those at a healthy weight. These individuals also have an increased risk of developing nearly 40 different comorbidities, obesity-related disease and medical conditions, including Type II Diabetes, heart disease and some types of cancer.