The first Diabetes Surgery Summit (DSS), an international conference held at the Catholic University of Rome, Italy, witnessed an audience of more than 50 scientific and medical experts, to mutually define and agree on a set of guidelines to guide the use and study of gastrointestinal surgery to treat type II diabetes. A consensus of 50 medical experts, in a first of its kind summit, pronounced surgery to be an acceptable and effective treatment for type II diabetes, bringing the procedure a significant step closer to wider use.

It is a well known fact that obesity promotes insulin resistance, thereby causing diabetes. For such obese patients, bariatric surgery has been proven to reduce diabetes. The present consensus is based on these studies which prove efficacy of bariatric surgery to treat type II diabetes obese patients, sometimes within weeks or even days, well before the patients have lost a significant amount of body weight.