BOSTON – Acute weight loss during the first year after bariatric surgery has a significant effect on hemoglobin A1c level improvement at 5 years’ follow-up, according to a study presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists.
The data presented could help clinicians understand when and where to focus their efforts to help patients optimize weight loss in order to see the best long-term benefits of the procedure, according to presenter Keren Zhou, MD, an endocrinology fellow at the Cleveland Clinic.
“Clinicians need to really focus on that first year weight loss after bariatric surgery to try and optimize 5-year A1c outcomes,” said Dr. Zhou. “It also answers another question people have been having, which is how much does weight regain after bariatric surgery really matter? What we’ve been able to show here is that weight regain didn’t look very correlated at all.”
Dr. Zhou and her colleagues developed the ancillary study using data from the STAMPEDE (Surgical Treatment and Medications Potentially Eradicate Diabetes Efficiently) trial, specifically looking at 96 patients: 49 who underwent bariatric surgery and 47 who had a sleeve gastrectomy.
Patients were majority female, on average 48 years old, with a mean body mass index of 36.5 and HbA1c level of 9.4.
Overall, bariatric surgery patients lost an average of 27.2% in the first year, and regained around 8.2% from the first to fifth year, while sleeve gastrectomy lost and regained 25.1% and 9.4% respectively.
When comparing weight loss in the first year and HbA1c levels, Dr. Zhou and her colleagues found a significant correlation for both bariatric surgery and sleeve gastrectomy patients (r +.34; P = .0006).