The silicone sleeve is placed near the end of the stomach and reaches the first part of the small intestine.
(Credit: Gut)
Bariatric surgery is primarily performed on people who are at least 100 pounds above their ideal weight and haven’t been able to lose weight via diet, exercise, or medication. The aim is to restrict the amount of food people can digest by disrupting their digestive process. It’s both invasive and irreversible — essentially a last-ditch effort.
So a new study on rats out of the University of Cincinnati is worth a look considering the upside if it works on people as well as it did on the trial rats. (At this point, that’s still a big if, though co-lead author Kirk Habegger said he expects these results to carry over to humans.)
Researchers inserted tiny “intestinal barrier sleeves” just inside the ends of the rats’ stomachs and extended the sleeves along the intestine. They did this surgically in the rats, but say that in humans it could be done by endoscopy — through the mouth and down into the gut — which may not sound pleasant but is far less invasive and doesn’t require hospitalization, not to mention the procedure is reversible since the sleeve can be removed.
“The whole key of course is to remove the knife,” Habegger said in an… [Read more]
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