This study from Purdue University (Indiana) provides evidence by MRI that electrical stimulation is an effective therapy to “cure” digestive disorders and in particular disorders of the gastrointestinal tract. While until now the effects of the therapy remained poorly understood, this work presented in the journal Neurogastroenterology and Motility deciphers, step by step, how sending an electrical impulse to the vagus nerve successfully corrects gastric complications. This technique paves the way for a more targeted treatment than drugs and dietary changes.
The only condition for the patient is to submit to several MRI exams with different electrical stimulation settings to find the best stimulation setting to relieve their symptoms, summarizes Kun-Han "Tom" Lu, Ph.D. student in electrical engineering and computer science. . He recalls that an important indicator of a digestive disorder is the speed at which the stomach expels food or their metabolites, or gastric emptying speed. Slow gastric emptying in the disorder of gastroparesis, for example, means that the stomach muscles don't move properly.
Stimulating the vagus nerve helps control how quickly the stomach empties, which can help treat gastroparesis. Moreover, certain stomach stimulation protocols already have the approval of the American Agency FDA, the authors point out, with however mixed results. The idea of the Purdue researchers is to combine MRI to better target and adjust therapy.
The proof is here provided in animals , whose vagus nerve is stimulated in order to obtain better control of the pyloric sphincter, the valve that controls food leaving the stomach and entering the small intestine. . A 3D reconstruction from MRI images demonstrates that stimulation relaxes the pyloric sphincter, accelerates gastric emptying, and corrects gastroparesis and other types of gastrointestinal dysfunction.
These new physiological data make it possible to better understand the impacts of the treatment and to adapt it to a specific organ or disorder. The researchers plan to push the technology to retrieve even more information about gastric physiology and perform first-in-human tests.
