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Gastric bypass surgery, a procedure for weight-loss wherein the stomach is made smaller in order to control the amount of food intake in people, reverses diabetes in many obese patients. But a new research claims that the disease only goes away for a short period of time and returns within three to five years in one-fifth of them.

For the study, researchers analyzed the medical records of 72 obese people with type 2 diabetes who had a Roux-en-Y gastric bypass procedure between 2000 and 2007, and had at least three years of follow-up visits, according to Health Day.

The results revealed that in 92 percent of the participants, the disease went away after the surgery. However, it returned in 21 percent of them within five years.

Weight-loss was noted to be faster and immediate among those in whom diabetes did not return and they also displayed a lower average weight throughout the follow-up period.

According to researchers, the time period for which the patients had diabetes before the surgery was directly proportional with the recurrence of the disease in them after the surgery. People who had diabetes for five or more years before the surgery were reportedly almost 4 times more likely to have the disease return back, compared to others.

The research results implicate that the sooner obese diabetes patients get the weight-loss surgery done, the better, lead author Dr. Yessica Ramos, an internal medicine resident at Mayo Clinic Arizona, in Scottsdale said according to Health Day.

"Providers and patients need to be aware of this information, to have a better idea of the expected outcome and be able to make an informed decision about pursuing gastric bypass surgery," Ramos said in an Endocrine Society news release.

The study was presented Saturday at the Endocrine Society's annual meeting in Houston.