Ozempic not working for you Gastric balloon is the last hope for weight loss

Imagine a professional blowing up a balloon with a small pump. No, we’re not talking about a clown at a birthday party, but engineers in a lab designing a medical product to treat obesity.

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have designed a new type of dynamic gastric balloon, a balloon that goes into the stomach, to treat weight loss study in the magazine Device:can inflate on command and can offer an alternative to weight loss drugs and invasive procedures such as gastric bypass surgery.

A traditional gastric balloon is essentially a bag of air or saline that is surgically placed in the stomach to make the patient feel full and prevent them from overeating to adapt to new sensations, making the benefits temporary, according to the study.The MIT engineers’ new design aims to avoid this outcome by blowing and puffing, never allowing the stomach to adjust.

“The basic concept is that we can have this balloon that’s dynamic, so it would be inflated right before a meal, and then you wouldn’t feel hungry. Then it would deflate between meals,” said Giovanni Traverso, who participated is involved in research and is also a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. statement. Engineers tested this idea on pigs and reported that the animals ate 60% less when the stomach balloon was inflated before eating.

The MIT researchers inserted the device into the pigs’ stomachs through an abdominal incision and controlled its inflation with an external pump connected to a stomach balloon, a tube similar to a feeding tube. Human patients could attach the external controller to their skin.

“If people, for example, cannot swallow, they receive food through such a tube. “We know we can keep the tubes for years, so there’s already precedent for other systems that can stay in the body for a very long time. That gives us some confidence in the longer-term compatibility of this system,” Traverso explained was used to record animal weight loss, so the researchers are now planning future long-term projects.

“Traditional gastric balloons usually take six months, if not longer, and that’s the only time you’ll see good weight loss. We’ll have to evaluate our device over a similar or longer period of time to prove it really works better.” says Neil Zixu Jia of MIT, who led the research.

Initially, the researchers created two alternative weight-loss prototypes: a new gastric balloon and a four-arm device that pushed against the stomach wall. They ultimately pursued the former, feeling that “the balloon probably distributed the force better,” and is a safer approach in the long run,” Traverso explained.

While Ozempic is taking the world by storm, these engineers have designed a potential future alternative for patients who, for any number of reasons, cannot treat obesity with medication or invasive surgery, such as gastric bypass surgery or stapling.