Diabetes can return after gastric bypass

21% of patients in a study had recurrence of their diabetes a few years after roux en y gastric bypass.  This suggests that those with diabetes might benefit from having weight loss surgery EARLIER in the course of their obesity and disease?  

It could be -

LA Times via Mayo Clinic -

A new study by researchers at the Mayo Clinic Arizona in Scottsdale, however, suggests that more than a fifth of those who are cured suffer a recurrence of their diabetes within five years, even without a weight gain. The results indicate that patients who had suffered from diabetes the longest were most likely to have a recurrence, suggesting that surgical intervention should be undertaken early in the course of the disease.

Dr. Yessica Ramos and her colleagues at Mayo studied the records of 72 obese patients who underwent a Roux-en-Y gastric bypass operation between 2000 and 2007 and who had at least three years of follow-up. They reported at a Houston meeting of the Endocrine Society that 66 of the patients (92%) had a reversal of their diabetes at some point. Within three to five years after their surgery, however, 14 of those patients (21%) had a recurrence of their diabetes. The patients who did not have a recurrence lost more weight initially and maintained a lower average weight during the study period, but they did not regain less weight than those who had a recurrence.

But the longer the patients had suffered from diabetes before the surgery, the more likely they were to have a recurrence. Patients who had had diabetes for more than five years were 3.8 times more likely to have a recurrence than those with less than a five-year history.