Quality of life of diabetic patients with medical or surgical treatment.

INTRODUCTION In general, most of the studies agree in that the quality of life (QoL) of patients with diabetes is worse than that of the general population. Furthermore, these same studies have also described very positive effects on quality of life after bariatric surgery. The aim of this study was to analyze whether the impact on quality of life of diabetic patients after being submitted to bariatric surgery is the one supposed to be. METHODS We prospectively analyzed our data on 524 diabetic patients submitted to bariatric surgery between 2001 and 2005. All the patients filled up three QoL questionnaires before the surgery and at 1, 3, 6, and 12 months after the surgery. The answers were gathered from an annual database. All patients were submitted to adjustable gastric band surgery, Y-Roux gastric bypass, or BPD-Scopinaro. RESULTS We obtained complete data on 89 patients that were included into the study. One year after the surgery, the QoL had significantly improved independent of disease remission and weight loss. Diabetes got improved in all the cases. The improvement on the quality of life was higher in the patients with total remission of the disease than in those only improving their health status, although it was lower than that of those patients without diabetes before the surgery. CONCLUSIONS After a literature review and with our own prospective data, we may conclude that the benefits obtained by diabetic patients from bariatric surgery are mainly due to improvement of their diabetes, irrespective of their initial BMI and the BMI decrease after the intervention. Further studies are needed to investigate the results of the QoL test in diabetics with low BMI after bariatric surgery and in the long run.