New York, Mar 31 (IANS): Obese patients may lose more weight if they undergo bariatric surgery before they develop diabetes, a study suggests.

Bariatric surgery refers to a gamut of weight-loss surgeries often recommended to people suffering from chronic obesity and obesity-related health problems such as diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol level and sleep apnea.

"Our study suggests that having bariatric surgery before developing diabetes may result in greater weight loss from the surgery, and together with data that is available from other studies, bariatric surgery may potentially prevent or delay diabetes from developing," said lead researcher Elif A Oral from University of Michigan in the US.

According to the researchers, both obesity and diabetes are common, serious and costly in the US. More than one-third of US adults are affected by these two conditions. Among patients have obesity and diabetes, bariatric surgery can lead to remission of both of these diseases.

For the findings, the research team analysed data from 714 patients in the Michigan Bariatric Surgery Cohort (MI-BASiC) to see whether diabetes before surgery could have any impact on weight loss outcomes five years or more after receiving bariatric surgery. The patients underwent either gastric bypass (380 patients) or sleeve gastrectomy (334 patients), which are the two most commonly used surgery types in the US.

All of the patients either had a body mass index (BMI) of more than 40 or a BMI of 35-39.9 with diabetes. BMI is a measure of body fat based on height and weight.

The study found patients without diabetes had a 1.6 times higher chance than those who already have diabetes of achieving successful weight loss (achieving excess body weight loss of at least 50 per cent or more) regardless of the surgery type. They also found the presence of diabetes before surgery diminished weight loss by 1.2 BMI points, which is roughly 10-15 per cent of the total BMI points patients lost on average.

Even after adjusting the effect of time, surgery type, age, gender and pre-surgery weight, the absolute weight loss, percentage of total weight loss and percentage of excess weight loss among individuals with diabetes were still significantly lower than individuals without diabetes."

Further research is needed to understand why diabetes diminishes the weight loss effect of bariatric surgery," Oral said.