United States: Preliminary evidence from a minute trial proposes that a combination of Ozempic – a diabetes medication – with a new kind of small intestine procedure may eventually do away with insulin for type 2 diabetics.
More about the news
More details were announced on Sunday during the United European Gastroenterology in Vienna, an annual meeting.
The US Mayo Clinic researchers invented the intestinal procedure employed in the new trial. It is referred to as Endoscopic re-cellularization via electroporation therapy (ReCET).
As per the experts, this operation is mainly concerned with the part of the small intestine termed the duodenum, US News reported.
The duodenum plays an important role in continuing the process of digestion conducted by the stomach and absorbing nutrients in the human body.
According to Dr. Andrew Storm, the director of endoscopy at the Mayo Clinic, duodenum function gets disrupted in type 2 diabetes, and ReCET works to reverse the damage.
“ReCET is a non-thermal procedure that involves delivering [via an endoscope] a pulsed electric field (PEF) to facilitate the re-cellularization of the duodenum with regenerated metabolically active cells,” he stated.
“The goal of this procedure is to help individuals achieve better control of blood glucose levels by correcting how the duodenum functions,” he added.
It is an outpatient procedure at most, Storm noted.
More about the ReCET procedure
The ReCET procedure was performed on participants under sedation. They were then advised to take a liquid diet for two weeks following the procedure and also receive weekly injections of Ozempic (semaglutide).
Nine of the 12 or 86 percent of patients remained off insulin at each time point during follow-up, according to Busch’s team. All patients also realized target glycemic control with an HbA1c blood test percentage below 7.5 percent.
Patients disclosed that they had almost no burdensome side effects from the Olympics; one patient said he felt some nausea, the authors pointed out.
“These findings are very encouraging, suggesting that ReCET is a safe and feasible procedure that, when combined with semaglutide, can effectively eliminate the need for insulin therapy,” as Busch mentioned.