Recently, there has been an exciting development in the area of Type II diabetes. Bariatric surgeons who are operating on extremely obese people to try and encourage them to lose weight have noticed that immediately following surgery, the symptoms of Type II diabetes and insulin resistance improve really quite dramatically, long before any weight reduction has actually started.

Let me introduce Dr. Daman Mullhi, she is a consultant anaesthetist at the Heart of England NHS Trust, and she has a particular interest in bariatrics.

Bariatric surgery is a term used for obesity surgery. And conventionally this has been a way of managing patients who have morbid obesity and it provides more effective weight loss rather than medical therapy.

More recently there’s been an interest in the same operation being a potential cure for Type II diabetes.

There are two types of bariatric procedures that are performed and the surgery that it is felt to be a cure for diabetes is one that is a bypass procedure, which bypasses part of the stomach and reduces the absorption of nutrients. It’s called a Gastric bypass operation.

The exact mechanism still remains unclear. It’s likely to be hormonal and the real beauty would be if we could find the mechanism and obviously develop a medical therapy from there.

This is potentially very exciting and very important for patients who live with daily issues of taking lots of diabetic medication. The potential for these long term complications and I’m sure that people will be very interested but it’s very important to point out that at this stage it’s very preliminary work. We have no long term data.

This is an invasive procedure, it is major surgery so I think at this stage we need to ensure that large scale trials are conducted and the evidence is robust before we advocate this for a definitive treatment for diabetes.