Baltimore, Maryland – A new, safe, minimally invasive, surgery-free treatment has been developed by a radiologist at Johns Hopkins University, to help obese people that no matter what they do, find a hard time losing weight.
This new image-guided treatment is called Bariatric Arterial Embolization (BAE) that consists on blocking blood flow on certain part of the stomach to help lose weight on obese patients.
Dr. Clifford Weiss, an associated professor at Johns Hopkins University explained that many ways to treat obesity are through behavioral modifications, diet and exercise along with medications and on most extreme cases surgery. He also expressed his excitement for BAE to be considered as another tool to fight obesity and to health care providers to start offering this new method. This study was presented at the Society of Interventional Radiology 2016 Annual Scientific Meeting located in Vancouver, Canada.
A benefit of the BAE, compared to the common-known surgical gastric bypass, includes a significative shorter recovery time, and it is also more effective when it comes to making the patient lose weight with a decreased hunger level after undergoing this treatment – good results for a preliminary procedure.
All patients that were under the BAE treatment showed in a month an average of excess weight loss of about 5.9%, and after six months it increased to 13.3%.
How does BAE work
This treatment sounds really effective and safe, especially to everyone who doesn’t want to go under surgical procedure but wants to lose weight. But how does it works? First, it starts by feeding a small catheter through the patient’s arteries via an incision in the groin or in the wrist, to an area of the top of the stomach called “the fundus” – from the groin seems to shorten the catheter’s trip – that produce the hunger-stimulating hormone known as Ghrelin. Later, tiny beads are injected through the catheter to decrease the blood flows to the fundus – this could make that the segregation of the Ghrelin decreases too and makes the patient lose weight.
What does this mean? The study used seven almost-morbid obese but healthy adults whose Body Mass Index (BMI) was from 40 to 60 – way above obesity levels that is about 30 – which leads to safe result on this seven adults.
Source: The Indian Express