China News Service, Beijing, August 30 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Springer Nature's professional academic journal "Nature-Medicine" recently published a health research paper that pointed out that brain stimulation adjuvant therapy guided by neural activity patterns related to eating impulses, It can improve eating self-control and promote weight loss in two patients with binge eating disorder and severe obesity.
The study, which did not report serious adverse effects, results from an ongoing clinical trial demonstrating the feasibility and safety of closed-loop deep brain stimulation guided by physiological mechanisms in the treatment of patients with uncontrolled eating.
Loss-of-control (LOC) eating is common in all forms of binge eating disorder and is characterized by an inability to exercise inhibitory control over appetite cues and appetite impulses, the paper said.
While the problem of uncontrolled eating is widespread and serious, most obesity-targeted therapies fail to address the problem directly, limiting the effectiveness of most aggressive treatments, such as bariatric surgery.
The paper's corresponding author, Casey Halpern, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, in collaboration with research colleagues, documented two patients diagnosed with binge eating disorder and refractory severe (grade III) obesity (a 45-year-old Female and a 56-year-old female) patterns of electrophysiological activity in the ventral dorsal region of the nucleus accumbens over 6 months.
They collected data on brain activity in the two patients during periods of standard eating, urge to eat, and uncontrolled eating during periods of food anticipation, and used this data to identify a low-frequency brain activity specifically associated with urge to eat and uncontrolled eating in both patients. activity characteristics.
The authors then used this newly discovered brain biomarker to guide deep brain stimulation of the nucleus accumbens in two patients through a device capable of reactive or closed-loop deep brain stimulation.
After 6 months of brain stimulation, they observed a significant reduction in uncontrolled eating episodes with accompanying weight loss in two patients, one of whom no longer met the diagnostic criteria for binge eating disorder.
The authors believe that the preliminary results of their pilot study highlight the potential clinical feasibility of this novel intervention and support further research in a larger population of patients with binge eating disorder.
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