The increasing incidence of obesity brings a parallel increase in type 2 diabetes (T2D), a metabolic complication of excess body weight. Despite recent improvements in pharmacotherapy, T2D symptoms are not normalised in up to 50% of patients, meaning a continued high risk of additional serious complications. Bariatric surgery, which involves the removal or re-routing of parts of the stomach and/or intestine, is known to provide significant weight-loss in the morbidly obese. However, whether these procedures can improve uncontrolled T2D, particularly in moderately obese individuals, has been unclear. Now, Schauer et al. report the first controlled trial comparing the results of bariatric surgery with medication versus medication alone in obese subjects with uncontrolled T2D. After 12 months, patients that underwent bariatric surgery had lost more weight and had decreased their medication use, whereas those receiving medication alone had lost very little weight and had increased their medication use. Although glycaemic control improved in all groups, 42% of those in the surgery cohort had normalised blood glucose, compared with only 12% in the medication alone group. Although larger studies will be needed to assess long-term outcomes, this study suggests that bariatric surgery combined with medication is a promising therapy for obese individuals with T2D.
Development/DMM Virtual Meeting 2021
Welcoming new Editors to DMM
Editor-in-Chief Liz Patton wants DMM to strengthen its presence in the field of translational biology and to focus on the importance of disease mechanisms, just as much as models. To implement this vision, we are pleased to welcome new Editors Sally Dunwoodie (Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, Australia), Monkol Lek (Yale School of Medicine, USA) and Rickie Patani (Francis Crick Institute, London, UK) to the team.
Roles of the gut microbiome in colorectal cancer development
Going hand-in-hand, a new Perspective by Foegeding et al. explores the Western diet as a driver of dysbiosis in colorectal cancer while a new Review by Wang et al. focuses on microbiota-driven mechanisms that initiate sporadic colorectal cancer.
preLights – the latest disease modelling preprints
Head over to preLights for the digests of the latest preprints:
Erin McGregor highlights work by Nowicka et al. that suggests a potential connection between mitochondrial dysfunction and neurodegeneration.
Emma Wilson discusses work by Dagra et al., which highlights D2 receptors as a potential target that could be used to alleviate alpha-Synuclein pathology in Parkinson’s disease.
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