From the abstract of a new paper on the question:
The 1-year case fatality rate was approximately 1% and nearly 6% at 5 years. . . .There was a substantial excess of deaths owing to suicide and coronary heart disease.
Six percent chance of dying within 5 years . . . Your chance of survival is probably better if you are posted to Iraq. On the other hand, another study found a 6% death rate within 5 years for matched obese persons who didn’t have the operation.
Ah, so not the miracle cure for diabetes it’s been held up as.
I agree. If it were effective in a big way surely the long-term death rate would be lower than that of a similar unoperated group.
It’s an interesting experiment, but not one I like to see carried out on humans. Bariatric surgery was developed as a weight-loss measure for the extremely obese, and of course weight loss typically improves outcomes for diabetics, even leading to remission in some cases. Weirdly, the surgery seems also to have an anti-diabetic effect independent of weight loss, and there have been some experiments performing operations on non-obese diabetics.
In other words, they’re on bridge of the UFO starcruiser, they have only a vague notion of what any of the buttons mean, but they find that pressing a certain pattern of buttons has certain desirable effects. As well as certain effects they don’t know about or don’t understand.