2 June 2016

Diabetes clinicians and researchers call for metabolic surgery as a treatment option for some people with Type 2 diabetes.

In a joint statement endorsed by 45 international organisations and published in the journal Diabetes Care, diabetes clinicians and researchers are calling for metabolic surgery to be recommended or considered as a treatment option for some people with Type 2 diabetes.

King’s Health Partners clinicians and researchers contributed to a special issue of Diabetes Care which sets out the first clinical guidelines for when to recommend or consider metabolic surgery as treatment for people with Type 2 diabetes.

Professor Francesco Rubino (pictured), Professor of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery at King’s College London and Consultant Surgeon at King’s College Hospital, who is first author of the paper, said:

Surgery represents a radical departure from conventional approaches to diabetes. The new guidelines effectively introduce one of the biggest changes for diabetes care in modern times.

The new guidelines emerged from the Second Diabetes Surgery Summit (DSS-II), an international consensus conference held in September 2015 at King’s College London, and jointly organised with Diabetes UK, the American Diabetes Association, International Diabetes Federation, Chinese Diabetes Society, and Diabetes India.

A second paper published in Diabetes Care explores the costs and benefits of meeting potential demand for metabolic surgery in the UK and US. Professor Rubino’s research provided the first experimental evidence that bariatric surgery can improve diabetes independently of weight loss.