By Anne Harding (Reuters Health) – Weight-loss surgery beats medication for controlling type 2 diabetes in obese people, according to the longest-term trial ever to compare the two approaches. Half of the patients treated with weight-loss surgery in the study were diabetes-free at five years, said Dr. Francesco Rubino of Kings College London in the UK and colleagues in a report in The Lancet. “The fact that some patients at five years are basically disease-free is a remarkable finding.” In 2009, he and his colleagues randomly assigned 20 obese patients with type 2 diabetes to receive medical treatment, 20 to receive a type of weight-loss surgery called a gastric bypass, and another 20 to undergo a weight-loss operation called a biliopancreatic diversion.