About 5 percent of people who have received a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes manage to send the disease into remission according to a study by researchers at the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh published in Plos Medicine.
"At the beginning of the nineties - explain the researchers - the possibility of remission in people with type 2 diabetes after bariatric surgery was demonstrated. Two recent studies have also shown that it is possible to obtain remission of the disease also through weight loss using low calorie diets ".
The research now wanted to verify whether even outside clinical trials some patients are able to turn off the disease.
It analyzed data from around 160,000 Scottish people with diabetes;
of these, in 2019, 7,710 had gone into remission, meaning that they continued to have normal levels of glycated hemoglobin for at least a year despite not taking drugs.
The researchers also studied the characteristics of patients who had reversed their diabetes: they tended to be older, were not yet taking drugs, had suffered severe weight loss, or had undergone bariatric surgery.
"The immediate implications for clinical practice are that these people should be recognized and followed appropriately so that they can receive adequate support," write the researchers who, however, caution: "It is important to know that diabetes remission it may not be permanent. "
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