A pill that can stimulate a hunger hormone has been tested in pigs – if the technology translates to humans it could help people with suppressed appetite or nausea, such as those receiving cancer treatments
Traverso and his team tested the capsule in 13 pigs that fasted overnight and were given anaesthetics. Eleven of the animals received 20 minutes of stimulation while the other two received no stimulation.before and 10 minutes after stimulation. They found that, on average, ghrelin increased by about 40 per cent in pigs that underwent stimulation whereas ghrelin decreased by about 50 per cent in pigs that didn’t.Get the most essential health and fitness news in your inbox every Saturday.
All the animals excreted the capsule within two weeks – a normal time span for pigs, says Traverso. Tissue samples collected from their stomachs, duodenums and colons showed no changes or signs of trauma, suggesting the therapy is safe. “To my knowledge, this is the first ingestible device that can deliver gastrointestinal electrical stimulation,” says
at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York. The technology could be tweaked to deliver electrical stimulation to other gastrointestinal tissues such as the colon.
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