Bioengineers have developed a controlled gastric balloon for weight loss
Bioengineers have developed a new type of gastric balloon to treat obesity, which is inflated before a meal and deflated after. Such manipulations better imitate the natural feeling of satiety and reduce the likelihood of getting used to the balloon, so it works more effectively.
In experiments on people, such a balloon reduced food consumption by 60 percent without significant complications, so in the future its safety and effectiveness will be tested on people. The research was published in the journal Device.
How does the new device work?
Doctors already install gastric balloons in obese patients, but over time a person's weight stops decreasing, i.e. reaches a plateau. One of the reasons for this may be that the stomach gets used to the feeling of fullness that comes from the static balloon. To combat this problem, scientists have developed two prototypes of the OSIRIS device: a motorized one and a gastric balloon-based one.
The motorized one opens and closes in the stomach like an umbrella and presses against its walls, and the balloon inflates and deflates through a tube that passes through the abdominal wall to a small body attached to the outside of the device. Both of these prototypes were tested on pigs and found that the balloon type performed better and also did not require as expensive materials as the motorized prototype.
Potentially, patients will be able to use one device for two years, which is significantly longer than the six months recommended for currently available cylinders. If OSIRIS passes human trials, it will become an affordable method of combating obesity, the incidence of which has only increased over the years and leads to an additional burden on the health care system, because obesity is associated with a large number of co-morbidities.
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