Obesity and technology: Can the stomach be fooled?

The company that invented the heart pacemaker is employing the same technology to trick obese patients into thinking their stomachs are full.

And Medtronic Inc., the world's biggest maker of medical devices, is not the only medical technology company trying to tap into the $100 billion obesity market.

While Medtronic is trying to develop a battery-powered gastric pacemaker that causes the stomach to contract, sending signals of satiety to the appetite center in the brain, a small start-up also is working with the famed Mayo Clinic on a device that uses electricity to paralyze the stomach, reducing or stopping contractions that churn food as part of the digestion process.

Doctors and companies across the United States are looking at various technologies to combat obesity, including brain stimulation. These methods, though not completely understood by doctors, may be preferable to bariatric surgery since device-based treatments are reversible and have fewer side effects.

Despite failures so far of some devices in clinical trials, companies are pushing ahead, convinced that medical devices hold the key to battling obesity.

Medtronic said it remains committed to solving obesity, largely untapped by the medtech sector, even though its implantable gastric stimulator, or IGS, failed to prove effective in a clinical trial in achieving excess weight loss after 12 months, said the new chief of the company's neurological business, Dr. Richard Kuntz.

Kuntz said the market for all therapy related to obesity is $100 billion; the market for the severely obese is $5 billion to $10 billion.

"We think that's conservative ... we think we could grow that market very quickly," Kuntz said in a recent interview from the company's headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Medtronic's stopwatch-size IGS, which the company acquired through its $260 million purchase of Transneuronix last year, is implanted under the skin of the abdomen with electric wires placed on the wall of the stomach.

The device "paces" the stomach by delivering small electrical currents that cause the stomach to contract.

Kuntz said he was not too discouraged by the trial's failure because there are still questions about the settings that should be used on the implants, such as how much voltage should be delivered and the frequency of stimulation.

Kuntz, a cardiologist by training, said Medtronic would also look at its deep brain stimulation technology - which uses tiny electrodes implanted in specific areas of the brain to affect behavior, movement and other functions - as a possible treatment for obesity.

Brain stimulation technology is currently approved in the United States to treat movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease and is being studied to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and severe depression.