There’s good news for who people who manage to reverse their diabetes – a new study finds they may remain free of the disease long-term, even if they've had the condition for years.

Some people with Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, can reverse this condition through  very low-calorie diet, but it isn’t known whether this is a temporary effect.

In 2011, a UK research team demonstrated in 2011 that putting these people on a diet of 600 to 700 calories a day reversed this condition.  This study caused attention, but the follow-up period was only eight weeks.

In this new study by the same team,  30 volunteers embarked on the same type of diet. They lost on average just over 28 pounds. Over the next six months they did not regain any weight.

The group included many people with longer duration diabetes, defined as more than eight years and ranging up to 23 years.  Overall, 12 patients who had had diabetes for less than 10 years reversed their condition and six months later they remained diabetes free. In fact, after six months a 13th  patient had reversed their diabetes.

Though the volunteers lost weight they remained overweight or obese but they had lost enough weight to remove the fat out of the pancreas and allow normal insulin production, the study found.

According to Dr. Rod Taylor, the lead author, this study supports his theory of a “personal fat threshold,” which holds that if a person gains more weight than they personally can tolerate, then diabetes is triggered, but if they then lose that amount of weight then they go back to normal.

"The study also answered the question that people often ask me -- if I lose the weight and keep the weight off, will I stay free of diabetes? The simple answer is yes,” says Taylor of the study, which appears in Diabetes Care.