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If only losing weight was as simple as taking a pill, right?
It's a common refrain, frequently exploited by those who peddle diet pills, fat burning supplements and fast fitness programs online.
Think about this before your skepticism hardens. An MIT researcher explained that his team had developed a sophisticated pill that could reduce the space inside your stomach, which would prevent more calories.
Although he offers no money back guarantee, Xuanhe Zhao – an badociate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT – is part of a team that has come up with a pill that has the size of a standard. A golf ball after ingestion and that could stay inside. the stomach as long as a month.
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The pill is still tested on models resembling the human gastrointestinal tract, but researchers hope to commercialize the technology one day.
"The idea is that you would eat some of these pills, they would swell in the stomach and occupy it with very soft materials so that people feel satiated and eat less," he said. Zhao. "It's simpler than surgery or putting sore rubber balloons in someone's stomach to get less food."
MIT
The pill expands to become a big balloon, then collapses to become a membrane, researchers said.
For those who have an extreme need for extreme weight loss, the options may seem daunting and invasive. Surgeries such as gastric bypbad and gastrectomy on the sleeve reduce the size of the stomach – decrease the number of calories that the body can absorb – but are irreversible and carry frightening risks, such as clot formation and d & # 39; infection.
The appeal of the expanding pill is its simplicity, Zhao said. The pill is made up of two types of hydrogels – polymer and water blends. Once swollen, says Zhao, the pill has a consistency similar to that of tofu or jelly.
To remove the objects from the stomach, he said, a patient would drink a calcium solution (at a higher concentration than milk) that would bring the tablets back to their original size, allowing them to to cross the digestive system.
Zhao said that weight loss is a potential application of technology, but there are others. For years, he said, researchers are trying to develop a pill that can stay in the human body for weeks or even months – a branch of research known as "unmanageable electronics" . The challenge, he said, was to design a pill small enough to be taken orally, but tough enough to withstand the perilous environment inside the human stomach, with his muscular compressions and his acidic juices.
"We really needed a pill to swell up fast enough before the stomach was empty," said Zhao, pointing out that the pill's design was inspired by the puffer fish, which is rapidly sucking up the air. 39 water to inflate its size and avoid predators.
As improbable as it may seem, such a pill would allow doctors to monitor certain body conditions such as pH balance, viruses, bacteria or temperature. The researchers say the pills could also be used to place tiny cameras in the body that could monitor tumors and ulcers over time. In-pill sensors could monitor whether a patient was taking his medication on time.
Not taking drugs – or "non-compliance" in the healthcare world – is a "common and expensive problem," according to a study cited by the National Biotechnology Information Center.
"About 30% to 50% of US adults are not adhering to long-term drugs, which would result in preventable costs estimated at $ 100 billion a year," according to the 2013 study.
Monitoring a patient from the inside may seem futuristic, but it is already happening.
At the Masonic Cancer Clinic of the University of Minnesota, doctors incorporate tiny sensors into pills allowing them to monitor the heart rate, activity level, and sleep cycle of chemotherapy patients. The sensor, which has the size of a grain of sand and dissolves in the gastrointestinal tract, also tells doctors if a patient has ingested a drug. The information is compiled into a database that doctors can access from their devices.
"I had a patient whose hands were painful and she could not open her pill bottle," said physician Edward Greeno. . "The app tells me in real time that she was not taking her meds and I'm getting this message to the clinic the next morning."
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