Important information for losing weight, weight loss pills and safe diet pills.

Just how desperate are you to lose weight - desperate enough to have electrodes implanted in your brain? That’s the latest approach to tackling obesity now being tested.

With experts warning of an obesity epidemic, drugs companies and medics have been working on newer and better ways to tackle weight gain.

Most recently, the focus has been on prescription medicines, with the development of slimming pills such as Alli, which work by reducing the amount of fat your body absorbs.

Beyond weight loss supplements there has also been a rise in the use of gastric surgery - literally re-plumbing people’s stomachs so they eat less.

But in the U.S., the latest approach to tackling obesity is even more drastic. Deep brain stimulation (DBS), as it is known, involves inserting electrodes into the brain to deliver tiny bursts of electricity to alter the patient’s behaviour.

The new approach is being tested in a U.S. Government-approved trial, which is running for three years.

During the procedure, patients first have holes drilled into their skull. The electrodes are then implanted - these are attached to wires, which are fed across the surface of the brain and under the skin to a small battery implanted under the collarbone.

So far, two patients have had the operation, and early indications are ‘promising’, with both eating less and losing weight.

The surgery was performed by Dr Donald Whiting, a neurosurgeon at West Virginia University Hospital. Dr Whiting admits it is a drastic procedure - ‘but obesity is a drastic problem’.

Other experts question how effective the treatment will be.

‘I think tinkering with the brain might prove too difficult,’ says Professor Tipu Aziz, a consultant neurosurgeon at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. ‘The technique was attempted on a patient in Canada and it failed. They found it helped his depression, but did not affect his desire to eat.’

Yet some British experts believe that medically, this approach makes sense. As Dr Ian Campbell, of the medical charity Weight Concern, says: ‘We know that hormones and the hypothalamus play a role in suppressing appetite and so it would be logical to use the brain as a way of treating obesity.