CHICAGO - Treating the ills of obesity with surgery rather than pills may become the new standard as the result of accumulating research, including a study that was presented Monday, doctors say.
Both in the study presented Monday and another cited by doctors, obese patients with diabetes saw dramatically improved health measures after bariatric surgery compared with medication alone.
As diabetes and obesity continue as two of America's major health problems, the new research is causing doctors to rethink how to best combat them.
"In 2012, we have to face up to the fact that obesity is a chronic metabolic disease, not a lifestyle choice," said James Stein, a cardiologist with the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. "We have to stop fooling ourselves that telling (obese and diabetic) people to walk 30 minutes and eat a little less is going to make a difference."
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Stein, who was not a part of the studies, said the failure to adequately treat obesity and diabetes is creating a "lost generation" of Americans.
In one of the new studies, which was done in Italy, two years after surgery 75 percent or 95 percent of patients had a remission of diabetes, depending on the type of procedure they underwent, compared with none of those treated with medicine alone. The study was small, involving 60 patients.
In the second study, which involved 150 obese patients treated at the Cleveland Clinic, those undergoing bariatric surgery achieved substantially better blood sugar control one year after the operation than those who got medicine alone.
The Cleveland Clinic study was presented in Chicago at the American College of Cardiology meeting, and both studies were published online in the New England Journal of Medicine.
On StarNet: Read the Star's special report on the link between poverty and obesity at go.azstarnet.com/obesity
