Could brain surgery help with obesity? AHN doctors investigate

PITTSBURGH — Can a type of brain surgery help with obesity? That’s what doctors at AHN are trying to find out in a new study.

They’ve already done one and have seen some success. Now they want to know if they can help more people.

“I know how hard it is to deal with people’s prejudices against heavy people,” said Pamela Beach. “My heaviest weight was just over 400 pounds.”

The West Virginia woman is sharing her success story about how an experimental brain surgery, done by a local doctor, helped her lose nearly half her weight.

“All of the treatments for obesity right now are outside of the brain, but the brain is where a lot of the control and the energy balance and the desire is mediated,” said Dr. Donald Whiting, Chief Medical Officer & Chair of Neuroscience Institute at Allegheny Health Network.

That’s why Whiting decided to go straight to the brain to see if he could change a patient’s metabolism and treat obesity this way. It’s called deep-brain stimulation. It’s used to treat other conditions, like Parkinson’s disease, but Beach was part of a trial in 2008 to see if it worked for obesity too.

“I haven’t found any miracle until I found this deep-brain stimulation,” said Beach.

Whiting puts an electrode in the hypothalamus, which is the food balance center. He then adjusts the electrical activity and realigns the circuitry in the brain to function more normally.

Beach went from 328 pounds at the time of the surgery to her current weight of 215 — but it didn’t all come off at once.

Doctors adjusted the electrical settings in pacemakers positioned under her collarbones and she also went to a metabolic clinic.

“My blood sugars are under (better) control than they’ve been in a long time,” said Beach. “I don’t seem to get as hungry as I used to and I don’t think about food all the time.”

Beach has also kept the weight off better than any other thing she’s tried, including gastric bypass surgery.

“She had a slow, steady but sustained weight loss that was very meaningful and changed her overall risk of other diseases, but also changed her lifestyle,” said Whiting.

“I wasn’t able to have any children or leave any kind of legacy for myself, so maybe this is what God gave me to do,” said Beach.

She was one of three people to take part in the initial trial more than 10 years ago. Now, Whiting wants to figure out why Beach in particular was successful, so he’s doing a second phase of the trial and looking for participants.

“I wish the same success that I had, to other people,” said Beach.

The AHN study is looking for six men and women, 22 to 65 years old, who have a body mass index higher than 50, and who are at significant risk of morbidity and mortality due to obesity. The participants also had to have had gastrointestinal bypass surgery without achieving sustainable results.

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