Brain cells damaged by obesity may contribute to Type 2 diabetes, a disease that is spreading at epidemic rates, according to a study released Wednesday.

And in unorthodox research also reported on Wednesday, doctors are exploring whether a radical type of weight-loss surgery on morbidly obese patients may also be a cure for the disease.

Diabetics do not produce enough insulin or cannot use the insulin they do make, causing wild and potentially dangerous fluctuations of glucose levels in the blood.

In a paper published by the British journal Nature, a team led by Bradford Lowell at Harvard showed that genetically-modified mice with impaired sugar-sensitive neurons developed glucose intolerance -- diabetes' core symptom.

Lowell found that the same brain cells were also defective in normal mice that had developed the disease due to obesity.

He concludes that a flaw in the brain's ability to sense glucose "might have a pathogenic role" in the development of Type 2 diabetes. If so, the way could be open to drug treatments to target the impaired cells, called pro-opiomelanocortin neurons.

The British weekly New Scientist, meanwhile, says that a team of Italian, Brazilian and French doctors are exploring an extraordinary accidental find.

In past years, surgeons have realised that a radical form of surgery on very obese patients in 98 percent of cases also causes their diabetes to vanish within a few weeks of the operation.