Science might just have come up with a way to stop overeaters from indulging too much.
A team at Stanford University is testing a new brain chip implant — the responsive neurostimulation system (RNS) — that proved effective in halting binge eating in mice.
So, why not humans?
The chip targets the nucleus accumbens in your brain. That’s the part that is stimulated during rewarding experiences. By giving that part of your brain a small zap every time you think about gorging on food, it could be possible to make you think twice.
Dr. Casey Halpern, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Stanford, told Medium the system was able to block the binge-like behavior in mice by at least 75%.
In the current study, Stanford researchers are looking for subjects — ages 22 to 64 — willing to undergo the “novel therapeutic approach,” specifically those “who have had gastric bypass surgery but regained weight.”
They only want six subjects with BMIs of 45 to 60. The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services says morbid obesity begins with BMIs of 40.
“These are patients who are essentially dying of their obesity,” he says.
The RNS was initially set up by the medical technology company NeuroPace as a way to treat people with epilepsy. The device — electrodes, computer, and a tiny battery — is inserted into the brain and detects specific patterns of activity that happen before a seizure. The mild zap delivered by the RNS stops the seizure before it happens.
“What our device can do … is define normal patterns and then define deviation from normal,” Dr. Martha Morrell, chief medical officer at NeuroPace, told Medium. “It’s not like you’re chasing the symptoms, it is that you are preventing the symptoms. And that is a very attractive approach to not only impulse control disorders, but also to any episodic neurological condition.”
The Stanford study will take place over the next six years, following the subjects for at least 18 months each.
