Obesity Treatments Get Stranger, Scarier

This could give you nightmares:

(WashingtonPost.com) - A New Buzz in Weight Loss: Gastric Pacemaker Gets a Test As an Obesity Treatment

When Jamie Finley begins an experimental weight management treatment later this month, she could receive a shock. Actually, the 41-year-old Woodbridge mother and business manager could get a whole series of them, and that's fine with her.

The shocks will come from a machine the size of a half dollar she's volunteered to have surgically implanted in her stomach as part of a clinical trial at the George Washington University Hospital Weight Management Program. Finley, a former Arkansan who grew up on Southern fried chicken and eggs cooked in bacon grease, hopes the novel device -- called an implantable gastric stimulation system -- will help her control her appetite and shed some of her roughly 200 pounds. And keep them off.

She's tried other means to reach that goal, improving her diet and trying reputable weight loss programs, but the extra pounds have always come back.

"This is a battle I've fought many times over," she said.

That makes her just the kind of patient researchers are seeking to try an approach less radical -- and therefore, with potentially broader application -- than gastric bypass.

Made by Transneuronix Inc. of Mount Arlington, N.J., the device consists of a battery-powered pulse generator and a 15-inch lead wire with two electrodes. At first glance, it resembles a stopwatch with a tail.

Like a heart pacemaker, the device sends out impulses that are generally undetectable to the patient, according to bariatric surgeon Scott Shikora of the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston, who has been testing the devices on obese patients for five years.

In this latest round of clinical trials, researchers will study whether the device fosters weight loss by causing an uncomfortable feeling of fullness -- satiety -- soon after a person begins eating.

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