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Editorial
June 5, 2013

Treating Diabetes With Surgery

Author Affiliations

Author Affiliations: Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, Oregon (Drs Wolfe and Purnell); Department of Epidemiology, University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

JAMA. 2013;309(21):2274-2275. doi:10.1001/jama.2013.4772

That type 2 diabetes remission may be induced by bariatric surgery in patients with grade 2 (body mass index [BMI] ≥35) and grade 3 (BMI ≥40) obesity soon after operation and preceding weight loss has stimulated new ideas regarding diabetes treatment. Some investigators have proposed surgical intervention for patients with type 2 diabetes with grade 1 obesity (BMI ≥30),1 with some even proposing bariatric surgery as the primary treatment for patients with type 2 diabetes and BMI as low as 27.2 The term metabolic surgery is commonly used to describe this class of surgical procedures because they primarily modify a patient's physiology for the better as opposed to simply correcting or removing an anatomic defect.

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