Abdominal surgery is a radical way of losing weight, but could it also cure type 2 diabetes?
Duodenal exclusion is a form of gastric bypass surgery in which the upper small intestine or duodenum is removed, so that the stomach feeds directly into the mid-small intestine. This reduces the amount of time the body has to absorb calories from food, meaning people lose weight.
Surgeons performing duodenal exclusions on obese people with diabetes had noticed that in around 98 per cent of cases the patients' diabetes spontaneously vanished a few weeks after surgery - too soon to be accounted for by weight loss.
Now a team of Italian, Brazilian and French doctors has performed duodenal exclusions on seven people with type 2 diabetes who were classified as normal weight to moderately obese, to see if it has a similar effect. Nine months after surgery, the first two people they ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.