GPs can help their patients with diabetes and obesity weigh up the benefits of metabolic surgery over standard medical therapy with an online risk calculator, US researchers say.

The Individualised Diabetes Complication (IDC) Risk Calculator predicts the likelihood that an individual patient will die or develop cardiovascular disease or diabetic kidney disease within the next 10 years depending on whether they have bariatric surgery or stick with medical therapy.

It quantifies outcomes with and without metabolic surgery based on 26 variables such as demographic data (age, sex, BMI, race, smoking), medical history, clinical and lab data (hemoglobin A1c, blood pressure, creatinine and triglycerides).

The calculator has been developed by researchers at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.