Devices for weight reduction are developed that cause electric pulse to flow from inside the stomach to make the brain 'full'

by Tony Alter

While people are concerned about weight, there are not many people who feel that they feel uncomfortable if they do not eat until they are full of stomach. For those who suffer from such obesity, "Devices that cause electric pulses to generate illusion that setting the stomach in the stomach and fullness of the brain" have been developed.

Effective weight control via an implanted self-powered vagus nerve stimulation device | Nature Communications
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07764-z

Implantable device aids weight loss - College of Engineering - University of Wisconsin-Madison
https://www.engr.wisc.edu/implantable-device-aids-weight-loss/

According to a survey in 2017, it is said that over 700 million adults and children worldwide are obese, and the number of people becoming obese is steadily increasing year by year. Xudong Wang, Professor of Materials Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, says that it succeeded in developing a device for dieting as small as 1 cm or less without requiring a battery.

The device itself has only the size of a coin, it is used by directly implanting into the stomach of the person who wants to use the device. Since the device does not have a battery on its own, once installed it is not necessary to remove it for battery replacement. Instead, it generates electrical pulses according to the natural movement of the stomach that occurs when eating cooking or sweets, and tells the vagus nerve that connects the stomach and the brain. It is said that this electric pulse causes the brain to be "full of food" now, so that the user of the device will not eat more than necessary and can diet.

"Electric pulses generated when the stomach moves is a natural phenomenon occurring in the normal body, and the developed device will enhance this movement," Wang says. In experiments using rats, a rapid weight loss occurred in 25 days after transplanting the device, and then the rats with the device stably stably after about 100 days had a 38% reduction in body weight compared to the control group He keeps keeping it.

There are also surgical treatments such as gastric bypass surgery that changes the size of the stomach itself for dieting, but it seems that the device developed by Mr. Wang has a reversible effect. In the experiment, when the device was removed 12 weeks after rats implanted the device, food intake immediately returned to the level before device transplantation and the body weight returned to original.

Mr. Wang is also a worldwide authority on nanogenerator, and the device developed this time is also the point that converts a slight movement called "swell of the stomach wall" into electricity and conveys it to the nerve. In the future we will proceed with experiments with larger animals and eventually expect to be applied to human beings, he says.

by Emilio Labrador