Picking up the Pacing in Obesity: Medtronic acquires Transneuronix

Medtronic soon will be able to offer a less invasive and safer surgical alternative to gastric bypass surgery, now that it has acquired Transneuronix for $260 million. Transneuronix has developed a gastric pacing device known as Transcend, which stimulates the stomach, and it appears to affect multiple mechanisms in obesity. The device has been approved in Europe, and has been implanted in more than 700 patients worldwide. In the US, Transneuronix has completed enrollment for its pivotal clinical trial.

You can't pick up a newspaper these days without finding obesity discussed as an epidemic in the US. In fact, there are 23 million Americans with a body mass index of 35 or greater, which means that they exceed their ideal weight by about 100 pounds. There are 8 million Americans that are even worse off, with a body mass index of 40 or more. This isn't just a cosmetic concern; the co-morbidities of obesity include cardiopulmonary failure, diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea and asthma; consequences so deadly, that, when they occur in 30 million severely obese people, justify surgery, according to a 1991 consensus statement from the National Institutes of Health . That consensus hasn't been updated, but Elizabeth H. Singer, a spokesperson for the institutes does admit that, at least as observed from uncontrolled studies, surgical procedures can produce larger and more sustained weight loss than non-surgical treatments, including exercise, lifestyle modification or even drugs.

Drug treatments for obesity largely don't work, chiefly because it is a multifactorial disease in a system that has many...

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