Nashville Diabetes Dentist

Gastric Bypass procedures are currently considered an elective procedure with no universally accepted algorithm to decide who should have the surgery. In the diabetic patient, certain types result in 99-100% prevention of insulin resistance and 80-90% clinical resolution or remission of type 2 diabetes. In 1991, the NIH (National Institutes of Health) Consensus Development Conference on Gastrointestinal Surgery for Obesity proposed that the body mass index (BMI) threshold to consider surgery should drop from 40 to 35 in the appropriate patient. The American Society for Bariatric Surgery (ASBS) and the ASBS Foundation suggested that the BMI threshold be lowered to 30 in the presence of severe co-morbidities. More debate has flourished about the role of gastric bypass surgery in type 2 diabetics since the publication of The Swedish Obese Subjects Study. The largest prospective series showed a large decrease in the occurrence of type 2 diabetes in the post-gastric bypass patient at both 2 years (odds ratio was 0.14) and at 10 years (odds ratio was 0.25).

A study of 20-years of Greenville (US) gastric bypass patients found that 80% of those with type 2 diabetes before surgery no longer required insulin or oral agents to maintain normal glucose levels. Weight loss occurred rapidly in many people in the study who had had the surgery. The 20% who did not respond to bypass surgery were, typically, those who were older and had had diabetes for over 20 years.

In January 2008, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published the first randomized controlled trial comparing the efficacy of laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding against conventional medical therapy in the obese patient with type 2 diabetes. Laparoscopic Adjustable Gastric Banding results in remission of type 2 diabetes among affected patients diagnosed within the previous two years according to a randomized controlled trial. The relative risk reduction was 69.0%. For patients at similar risk to those in this study (87.0% had type 2), this leads to an absolute risk reduction of 60%.

These results have not yet produced a clinical standard for surgical treatment of diabetic patients, as the mechanism, if any, is currently obscure. Surgical cure of Type 2 diabetes must be, as a result, considered currently experimental.

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