How Gas Filled Balloons Can Help You Cure Obesity

Obesity is a worldwide problem and more people are suffering from this lifestyle disease every year. If you have worked in every possible way to reduce your fat to win the war against obesity with little effect, then here is some good news for you. Scientists have developed a new treatment to combat the war against obesity and overweight. This new treatment involves you to swallow balloons filled with gas that makes you eat less (as you always feel filled up) and thus deals with obesity effectively.

This unique idea was headed by the lead researcher Shelby Sullivan from School of Medicine in St. Louis, Washington University, Missouri.  According to Dr. Sullivan, the director of Bariatric endoscopy this new balloon technique can solve the problem of obese patients by helping them to lose about twice the weight compared to the weight lost by other lifestyle changes. This is a significant achievement as losing weight becomes difficult for obese patients and considerable number of such patients fails to achieve their weight loss target through exercise and diet change.

Public health experts conveyed that globally over 640 million people suffer from obesity i.e. people having BMI > 30 and every year the number is increasing. Moreover, there are millions of people considered to be overweight with BMI over 25, but below 30. Presently, there are more people in the world, who are overweight than normal or underweight people.

Researchers further studied that this gas filled balloon treatment can produce an average of 6.81% loss of the whole total body weight compared to the 3.59% weight loss achieved by the control group (people tried to cut weight through lifestyle changes, diet and exercise).

The treatment is known as the Obalon Balloon Treatment. The team of researchers under Dr. Sullivan found that 64.3% of obese patients receiving the balloon treatment attained at least 5% loss of total body weight, in comparison to 32% of the control group.  Additionally, the patients receiving the balloon treatment experienced major improvement in other parameters such as triglycerides, fasting glucose, systolic blood pressure and LDL cholesterol.

This Obalon Balloon Study by Dr. Sullivan and her team is presented in the Digestive Disease Week meeting.

The post first appeared in KenFolios - Health. Be Informed be Healthy.