If nonmedical interventions such as diet exercise or existing medical interventions including gastric bypass surgery, as well as gastric balloons are not helping you to shed those extra kilos then fret not.
MIT engineers have now come up with a new way to take advantage of that phenomenon, using an ingestible capsule that vibrates within the stomach. These vibrations activate the same stretch receptors that sense when the stomach is distended, creating an illusory sense of fullness.
In animals who were given this pill 20 minutes before eating, the researchers found that this treatment not only stimulated the release of hormones that signal satiety, but also reduced the animals’ food intake by about 40 percent.
Scientists have much more to learn about the mechanisms that influence human body weight, but if further research suggests this technology could be safely used in humans, such a pill might offer a minimally invasive way to treat obesity, the researchers say.
“For somebody who wants to lose weight or control their appetite, it could be taken before each meal,” said Shriya Srinivasan, a former MIT graduate student and assistant professor of bioengineering at Harvard University.
“This could be really interesting in that it would provide an option that could minimize the side effects that we see with the other pharmacological treatments out there.”
Srinivasan is the lead author of the new study, which has appeared in Science Advances. Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is the senior author of the paper.
In a study in animals, the researchers showed that once the pill begins vibrating, it activates mechanoreceptors, which send signals to the brain through stimulation of the vagus nerve. The researchers tracked hormone levels during the periods when the device was vibrating and found that they mirrored the hormone release patterns seen following a meal, even when the animals had fasted.
The researchers then tested the effects of this stimulation on the animals’ appetite. They found that when the pill was activated for about 20 minutes, before the animals were offered food, they consumed 40 percent less, on average, than they did when the pill was not activated.
