News Release

A potential treatment for gastric motility disorders

Peer-Reviewed Publication

World Journal of Gastroenterology

GES or pacing has been under investigation as a potential therapy for gastrointestinal motility disorders. Conventionally, GES is performed using a single pair of electrodes or single-channel GES. However, few studies have investigated the effects of two-channel GES with trains of pulses on gastric motility, such as gastric slow waves and gastric emptying.

A research article to be published in May 21, 2009 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this question. The research team led by Prof. Chen from University of Texas Medical Branch studied the effects of two-channel GES with trains of pulses on gastric slow waves and gastric emptying in health dogs.

Most previous studies showed that long pulse GES was able to entrain gastric slow waves in human and animals. None of previous studies have investigated the effect of GES with trains of pulses on gastric slow waves. It has been indicated that GES with trains of short pulses was able to improve symptoms, such as nausea and vomiting of gastroparesis, but was not capable of entraining gastric slow waves or normalizing gastric dysrhythmias. In this study, we have shown that GES with trains of pulses is able to entrain gastric slow waves when the pulses in the train are of a width of 4ms or higher.

Recently, a few studies were performed to investigate the efficiency of multi-channel GES on gastric emptying and entrainment of slow waves. Some studies indicated that multi-channel stimulation with long pulses was more efficient than single-channel stimulation for the entrainment of slow waves and the acceleration of gastric emptying. To date, no study has investigated the effects of multi-channel GES with trains of pulses on gastric emptying. In our experiment, we found two-channel but not single-channel GES with trains of pulses significantly accelerated gastric emptying.

The results of our study suggest that 2-channel GES with trains of pulses may be applicable for the treatment of gastroparesis and normalization of gastric dysrhythmia. GES with trains of pulses is technically more attractive than long pulse GES. Currently, most of commercially available implantable stimulators use trains of pulses. However, none of available implantable stimulators are capable of generating pulses with a width equal to or larger than 4ms. Therefore, new hardware design and development are needed.

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Reference: Yang B, Hou XH, Song GQ, Liu JS, Chen JDZ. Effect of two-channel gastric electrical stimulation with trains of pulses on gastric motility. World J Gastroenterol 2009; 15(19): 2406-2411 http://www.wjgnet.com/1007-9327/15/2406.asp

Correspondence to: Dr. Jiande DZ Chen, Department of Gastroenterology, University of Texas Medical Branch, 301 University Blvd, Basic Science Building, Room 433, Galveston, TX 77555-0655, United States. jianchen@utmb.edu

About World Journal of Gastroenterology

World Journal of Gastroenterology (WJG), a leading international journal in gastroenterology and hepatology, has established a reputation for publishing first class research on esophageal cancer, gastric cancer, liver cancer, viral hepatitis, colorectal cancer, and H pylori infection and provides a forum for both clinicians and scientists. WJG has been indexed and abstracted in Current Contents/Clinical Medicine, Science Citation Index Expanded (also known as SciSearch) and Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition, Index Medicus, MEDLINE and PubMed, Chemical Abstracts, EMBASE/Excerpta Medica, Abstracts Journals, Nature Clinical Practice Gastroenterology and Hepatology, CAB Abstracts and Global Health. ISI JCR 2003-2000 IF: 3.318, 2.532, 1.445 and 0.993. WJG is a weekly journal published by WJG Press. The publication dates are the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th day of every month. WJG is supported by The National Natural Science Foundation of China, No. 30224801 and No. 30424812, and was founded with the name of China National Journal of New Gastroenterology on October 1, 1995, and renamed WJG on January 25, 1998.

About The WJG Press

The WJG Press mainly publishes World Journal of Gastroenterology.


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