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WASHINGTON:
An Indian American medical scientist has successfully suppressed levels of
‘hunger hormone’ ghrelin in pigs, which could pave the way for a lasting
solution to obesity in people.
He relied on a minimally
invasive mode of vapourising the main vessel carrying blood to the top section
or fundus of the stomach. An estimated 90 per cent of the body’s ghrelin
originates in the fundus, which, without good blood supply, can’t synthesise the
hormone.
“With gastric artery
chemical embolisation, called GACE, there’s no major surgery,” said Aravind
Arepally, clinical director of the Centre for Bio-engineering Innovation, design
and associate professor of radiology and surgery at the Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine.
“In our
study in pigs, this procedure produced an effect similar to bariatric surgery by
suppressing ghrelin levels and subsequently lowering appetite.”
Arepally and his team pointed
out that for more than a decade, efforts to safely and easily suppress ghrelin
have met with very limited success.
Bariatric surgery - involving
the removal, reconstruction or bypass of part of the stomach or bowel - is
effective in suppressing appetite and leading to significant weight loss, but
carries substantial surgical risks and complications.
“Obesity is the biggest
bio-medical problem in the country, and a minimally invasive alternative would
make an enormous difference in choices and outcomes for obese people,” Arepally
said.
Arepally and colleagues
conducted their study over four weeks, using 10 healthy, growing pigs; after an
overnight fast, the animals were weighed and blood samples were taken to measure
baseline ghrelin levels. Pigs were the best option, because of their human-like
anatomy and physiology, he said.
Using X-ray for guidance,
researchers threaded a thin tube up through a large blood vessel near the pigs’
groins and then into the gastric arteries supplying blood to the stomachs.
There, they administered
one-time saline injections in the left gastric arteries of five control pigs,
and in the other five, one-time shots of sodium morrhuate, a chemical that
destroys the blood vessels.
The team then sampled the
pigs’ blood for one month to monitor ghrelin values. The levels of the hormone
in GACE-treated pigs were suppressed up to 60 percent from baseline.
These findings were reported
in the Tuesday online edition of Radiology.
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