It's a stomach-turning idea - but an invention detailed in a US patent application published by Aspire Bariatrics of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, nevertheless holds out the hope of a treatment for morbid obesity without the invasive surgery and drawbacks of a gastric bypass.
The idea is to let patients eat and drink as much as they like - but they then drain their stomach some 20 minutes after a meal by connecting a pump to a valve surgically installed on their abdominal wall. You can see how it's fitted - with some of the tech passed in via the mouth and some via the abdominal wall - in the video here.
The system is not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration but in early clinical trials some patients are said to have lost an average of 20 kilograms in one year, some nearly twice that.
Bizarre as it sounds, the idea has a strong inventive pedigree, springing partly from the mind of Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway self-balancing human transporter. Kamen is also active in the field of medical devices, and the patent lists him as a co-inventor alongside many of the Aspire Bariatrics executive team.
The technique is supposedly less surgically invasive than the many variants of gastric bypass surgery that some 200,000 people have every year in the US alone. That could help patients avoid some of the bizarre hormonal and psychological effects that some experience post-operatively, such as iced tea tasting like fish - as New Scientist detailed in a compelling in-depth article last May.
But the patent itself shows there's a way to go before this food extraction idea can become acceptable in terms of making it pump out the vast array of foods humans consume. Detailing the problems one clinical triallist faced, it says the patient had to squeeze the pump tube to "enhance propulsion and to break up large food".
It then adds: "The patient changed her dietary intake to avoid food clogging [the pump tube]. She avoided eating cauliflower, broccoli, chinese food, stir fry, snow peas, pretzels, chips and steak." Good luck to them - but I can't help feeling the yuck factor currently outweighs the benefits.
- The food extraction system connects the stomach to the abdominal wall (Pic: USPTO)
- extractor[1].jpg (29.24 KiB) Viewed 2027 times