Doctors try to not do bypass surgeries for people with diabetes through the removal of excess glucose in the small intestine.
Gastric bypass improves the symptoms of people with type 2 diabetes before they even start losing weight.
How? Doctors have discovered that the secret for the curing of diabetes after gastric bypass is in the intestine. The takeaway is that the intestine becomes the most important tissue for use of glucose and this decreases blood sugar levels.
This research was even published in the Science journal.
Doctors are still trying to find a way to mimic this process that leads to a drastic improvement for people with type 2 diabetes after a gastric bypass without doing surgery.
Gastric bypass is one of the most common weight loss remedies for people who are morbidly obese. After the operation, the small intestine starts to produce a molecule named GLUT-1 which helps the body in using glucose.
It’s cool because this molecule isn’t normally present in adult small intestines, only when we’re fetuses. It’s produced because the intestine works harder in doing its job, for example absorbing nutrients or moving food down even more. It’s also the stress of dumping food down directly to the intestine, because the stomach area is bypassed.
Weight loss and the improvement of your diabetes condition go together. It solves the disease before weight loss happens.
According to the CDC, around 26 million people have diabetes. That’s around 8 percent of the population. Diabetes has complications like eye damage, kidney damage, nerve damage, and propensity to get heart attacks and strokes.
The problem worsens if they consider type 2 diabetes rates increasing because of being obese. What’s more, childhood obesity rates also tripled since the 80s. Diabetes symptoms appear today even in young people.
Although a little factoid. GLUT-1 studies have only ever been done in rats. It’s yet to be determined if it actually appears in humans who have undergone gastric bypass surgery. Continual research are testing whether non-surgical techniques will simulate the effects of gastric bypass done in animals.
The goal is to find a way make the small intestine the dumpsite from glucose in the bloodstream. This is a new way of getting rid of glucose in your body. This would mean great things for diabetics, because lowering blood glucose levels prevents diabetic complications.
People are continuously researching how they can bypass the bypass. Intestines are more accessible than organs like the brain, and its cells are easily manipulated.
More research is needed to know why gastric bypass surgery simulates the production of GLUT-1.
It can be possible in the future to mimic this effect pharmacologically.
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