LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR Francesco Rubino, MD Congress Director

An estimated 246 million people worldwide now have diabetes, a number that is expected to grow to 380 million by 2025. Type 2 diabetes, the most common form, is the principal reason for blindness among adults. It often leads to cardiovascular disease, kidney failure and premature death. According to the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the disease could lower the average life expectancy of Americans for the first time in more than a century. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that almost 80% of worldwide deaths attributed to diabetes are in low and middle-income countries where access to even basic therapies is limited, yet the growth of the disease escalates at epidemic proportions.

Disabilities and deaths are not the only toll of diabetes. Its economic costs approach those of all cancers combined. Without immediate and bold action, diabetes will overwhelm existing healthcare services and national economies, especially those in developing countries. Because of the scale of the problem and the epidemic growth of diabetes, finding new approaches to treat and understand the disease has become a race against time.

Revolutionary new treatments or a cure could change everything.

Emerging evidence shows that bariatric surgery can dramatically improve type 2 diabetes, allowing many patients to maintain normal blood glucose and glycosylated hemoglobin levels while discontinuing all diabetes-related medications. The possibility to achieve complete, long-term, medication-free remission challenges long-held medical theories that consider diabetes as a chronic, progressive and irreversible illness.

Furthermore, recent experimental studies point toward the rearrangement of gastrointestinal anatomy as a primary mediator of the surgical control of diabetes. These findings open new avenues for future interventional and pharmacological therapies and provide a promising lead to the origin of the disease.

The Diabetes Surgery Summit, held in Rome, Italy in March 2007, established international consensus guidelines on the clinical use of surgical treatment of diabetes and called for prioritizing research in the emerging field of interventional diabetology. Our efforts must now ensure access to approved interventional treatments and prioritize research in this area. This is a challenge that demands the collaboration of physicians, surgeons, scientists and health policy-makers.

The 1st World Congress on Interventional Therapies for Type 2 Diabetes is a comprehensive and multidisciplinary forum where leaders in the global health community will conduct an organized review and discussion of the latest scientific data and theories. The overarching aim is to craft an agenda of health policy initiatives and seize the opportunity offered by novel interventional therapies. On behalf of the organizing committee, I invite you to attend this extraordinary, multidisciplinary event.

Together we can take a timely and critical step toward one of the most important goals of 21st century medicine: finding a cure for diabetes.



Francesco Rubino, MD
Congress Director

Director, Diabetes Surgery Center
Weill Cornell Medical College