THE ANSWER IS ON THE TABLE –

Nov. 8, 2022 – If that were the case, people who live with binge eating disorder — a psychiatric diagnosis — might be no more at fault for overeating than a patient with Parkinson’s disease is for their tremors. That question led doctors to try a new treatment different from anything ever attempted to help people with this common but underreported eating disorder. At least 3 percent of the population has it, said Dr. Casey Halpern, a neurosurgeon at the University of Pennsylvania.  

He and his colleagues decided to try deep brain stimulation, a method routinely used to quell tremors in patients with Parkinson’s. It involves placing electrodes in the brain to regulate aberrant signals. The wires, connected to the electrodes, are placed under the scalp, where they are invisible and unobtrusive. 

For the binge eating treatment, the device only stimulates neurons when the device detects a signal to start a binge. The pilot study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and published earlier this year in the journal Nature Medicine, involves two women…    

Their binge eating is not what most people call binging, as when they occasionally start on a bag of chips or on a gallon of ice cream and just keep going. Instead, their condition is in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It involves binging multiple times a week. The binges are accompanied by a feeling of being almost in another state in which they lose all control, quickly consuming large amounts of food. Many, embarrassed by their behavior, binge in secret. It is common to feel disgust and shame when the binge ends.

CLICK FOR MORE