Back in 1980, Walter Pories, a bariatric surgeon at the University of North Carolina, began performing the first gastric bypass surgery on a patient (then an open procedure) with severe type 2 diabetes, and the surgery was successful, with ideal postoperative weight loss and, amazingly, the patient’s postoperative blood glucose was not high. After performing three such surgeries, he found that all of these patients no longer required insulin to treat their type 2 diabetes, and the family physician confirmed his finding at the time that the diabetes had disappeared in every postoperative patient, even before the patient had lost significant weight. incurable. After the fourth patient’s surgery, he, along with an endocrinologist, personally drew blood from these patients for testing and found that these patients’ blood sugar levels had indeed dropped significantly, but at the time they remained stubborn in their belief that the testing center staff had made a mistake. “If you’re a doctor, you’re probably used to attributing your mistakes to others.” Walter Pories said jokingly when he spoke of the incident later.
As more and more diabetic symptoms in similar patients disappeared after gastric bypass, Walter Pories began to believe it was true. However, in an era when the idea that diabetes could be reversed by surgery was so oddly funny, Walter Pories did not choose to challenge the public to repeat this major discovery, and he went on to follow and observe his patients over time. It wasn’t until 1995 that he reported in Annals of surgery that 146 obese patients with type 2 diabetes who had undergone gastric bypass surgery were cured after 14 years of follow-up in 121 (83%) of the patients with type 2 diabetes, a result that was and still is superior to other treatments for type 2 diabetes. The publication of this article attracted a great deal of attention from the academic community, and the discipline of metabolic surgery gradually took shape. Subsequently, a large body of literature was published and a great deal of research was conducted in this field.
At that time, diabetes was one of the most common diseases that threatened human health, and its treatment was complicated and ineffective. Since then, the incidence of diabetes has been increasing at an alarming rate year by year, until today, there are more than 93.2 million people with diabetes in China, of which the prevalence of type 2 diabetes has reached 11.4%! Millions of patients have consumed “huge sums of money” and even amputated limbs to drive away diabetes, but the major discovery of surgical treatment for type 2 diabetes has brought new hope to diabetics.