Before COVID-19, we had (and still have) the obesity epidemic. Obesity has ravaged the physical and mental health of many Americans. It negatively impacts nearly every organ system, including the kidneys. Weight loss is the best antidote but is not easy to achieve. Exercise is difficult to sustain, and medications that suppress hunger or accelerate metabolism are underused and fraught with tolerability issues and adverse effects. Gastric bypass surgery is a relatively new therapy that has had positive effects for those patients who qualify for the procedure. Bypass surgery is considered an efficient method of fighting obesity and has been shown to reduce cardiovascular risk and improve, if not cure, type 2 diabetes.
A paper from Sweden investigated whether gastric bypass in patients with type 2 diabetes would improve kidney function.
This study is your typical retrospective database review that used large national databases, primarily: the Scandinavian Obesity SurgeryRegister (SOReg) and the National Diabetes Register (NDR). The former contains clinical and epidemiologic information about patients who received gastric bypass; the latter, data for patients with type 2 diabetes. The researchers cross-referenced the databases and divided the patients with diabetes into those who received gastric bypass and those who did not.
