Article Summary: The Transoral Gastroplasty, or TOGA ® for short, is a new approach to weight loss surgery that eliminates the need for abdominal incisions. Instead of entering the stomach through the abdomen, as with most bariatric procedures, the TOGA procedure goes in through the mouth. Read on to learn more about it.
No, it doesn’t involve dressing up in a sheet. It’s not that kind of toga. It’s the TOGA procedure for weight loss surgery, and it could very well be the next big thing in the field of bariatric surgery for weight loss.
There is a new type of weight loss surgery being conducted at select surgery centers across the United States. It is called the TOGA Procedure and at this time (October 2008) it is still in the experimental / clinical study stage of development.
But the TOGA Procedure looks like a promising development in the world of weight loss surgery, so we know people will be researching this procedure online in the coming weeks and months. The official TOGA Procedure website (TogaClinicalStudy.com) offers a lot of information on it. But our policy is — too much information is never a bad thing! So we have gathered as much information as we could find about this new technique for weight loss surgery.
Overview of the TOGA Procedure
We first heard about this new procedure through a news story published on NBC affiliate website (October 6, 2008). So we immediately began researching the subject. The news article quoted a doctor at Cedars-Sinai hospital in California, one of the surgery centers who are running TOGA Procedure trials.
According to the doctor quotes in the article, this procedure is unlike other forms of weight loss surgery in a significant way — there are no incisions made to gain entry into the patient’s stomach. Instead, the bariatric surgeons insert a flexible device in through the patient’s mouth and down into the stomach. At that point, the TOGA Procedure does something similar to other weight loss surgeries. It staples together portions of the patient’s stomach to create a small “pouch.”
According to the summary posted at the clinical trials website of the National Institutes of Health: “The TOGA procedure is an incision-free treatment using a set of flexible staplers introduced into the mouth and esophagus to create a sleeve in the stomach … The TOGA sleeve limits the amount of food that can be eaten and gives the patient a feeling of fullness after a small meal.”
If you are familiar with bariatric procedures in general, that last part will sound familiar. While this new technique uses a different entry point (the mouth) it achieves the same end-result as the gastric bypass — it segments the stomach to reduce the patient’s gastronomic capacity. If the patient feels full with less food, weight loss will soon follow.
In this way the TOGA Procedure is similar to other bariatric surgeries such as the vertical banded gastroplasty or VBG. And as with these other procedures, the stomach segmenting process reduces the usable portion of the stomach, which in turn leads to weight loss.
TOGA is an acronym that stands for Transoral Gastroplasty — i.e., a gastric surgery that is performed orally by passing through the mouth.
At this time (Oct 08), the procedure is only being performed at a handful of obesity centers in the United States. Potential patients who would like to participate must complete a pre-screening questionnaire that includes, among other things, a body mass index (BMI) calculation to determine obesity level. According to the FAQ page for the clinical study, a BMI of 35 – 55 is needed to be an eligible candidate for the TOGA Procedure trials.
The clinical trials for this procedure are being sponsored by Satiety, Inc., which is the company that manufactures the transoral device used in the surgery. The ClinicalTrials.gov website offers some information about the study, but not much on the procedure itself. It does offer the following summary of the technique:
The TOGA procedure is an incision-free treatment using a set of flexible staplers introduced into the mouth and esophagus to create a sleeve in the stomach … [which] limits the amount of food that can be eaten and gives the patient a feeling of fullness after a small meal.
At the time of this article, I could not find any information on the FDA website about the product or the procedure. But this is usually the case when a new device is in the clinical trials stage of development. We will update this fact sheet when more information about the Transoral Gastroplasty / TOGA Procedure is made available to the public.
