By Andrew M. Seaman (Reuters Health) – People with type 2 diabetes who have weight loss surgery are more likely to have significant improvements in their diabetes three years compared to diabetics who try lifestyle changes, a small new study suggests. “One of the most important things to take away is that there is durability of remission over time,” said Dr. Anita Courcoulas of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who led the research. Past studies have found that weight loss surgeries sometimes result in improvement for people with type 2 diabetes, but it remains to be seen if the surgeries are better at treating the condition than lifestyle interventions, the researchers write in JAMA Surgery.

Liraglutide, an injectable diabetes drug that US regulators approved last year for weight loss, helped obese people lose an average of 18 pounds (eight kilograms), a yearlong study said Wednesday. Most patients were able to keep the weight off for the duration of the 56-week study on the drug marketed as Saxenda by Novo Nordisk, according to the findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) – Roughly half of first-time mothers in the U.S. gain too much weight during pregnancy, about the same proportion who are overweight at the start, a study finds. Researchers compared data on more than 2 million U.S. women to a group of about 1,650 of their peers in Germany, where almost three-fourths of first-time mothers started pregnancy at a healthy weight and only 27 percent exceeded weight gain recommendations. “The differences in overweight rates pre-pregnancy and in weight gain are surprising,” lead study author Dr. Joachim Dudenhausen, an obstetrics researcher at Charite University Medicine in Berlin, said by email.

Adult obesity rates reached 9.6 percent in 2012, more than doubling over a decade, the National Health and Family Planning Commission said in a report on national nutrition and chronic diseases. “The problem of overweight and obesity is rising sharply as the dietary make-up has changed,” Wang Guoqiang, a vice director of commission, told a press conference. “Smoking, excessive drinking of alcohol, insufficient physical exercises and unhealthy diet such as high salt and fat consumption are the main behaviour risk factors that trigger and worsen chronic diseases,” Wang said at the briefing Tuesday.

Chinese people are growing taller as the country becomes richer but they are getting fatter even faster, the government and state media said. The proportion of Chinese over-18s who were overweight stood at 30.1 percent in 2012, up 7.3 percentage points over a decade, Wang Guoqiang, a vice director of the National Health and Family Planning Commission, told a press conference. The obesity rate had risen by 4.8 percentage points to 11.9 percent, he said Tuesday — a two-thirds increase.