Keeping Pace Vs. Bulimia

There may be a significant new development in the treatment of the eating disorder bulimia.

Researchers think they have found the key to stopping the urges associated with the disease, with a new use for an old medical device: the pacemaker, reports CBS News Correspondent Lee Cowan.

He says that, when he asked Jennifer Liptak if he could tag along on her nightly roller blading route, she thought it was a bit odd. But to Cowan, it was important to illustrate her story.

The reason: she never had time to do something this simple before: She was too busy being secretly sick.

"It was something that I knew I needed to get help, and I knew it needed to go away, but I couldn't find the answer," Liptak says.

Like more than a million other women across the country, Liptak suffers from bulimia. She told Cowan how she would binge on huge amounts of food, then purge it all away, sometimes as often as three times a day.

"My whole life was controlled by bulimia," Liptak says. "I was non-sociable, didn't want to go out, l didn't want to do anything, just focus mainly on that."

Karen Eckstrom was even worse, Cowan observes. At the height of her illness, she would binge and purge as frequently as 100 times a week.

"It's like an old lover," Eckstrom remarks. "It doesn't leave you, you have to leave it."But one researcher at the University of Minnesota thinks she may have found a way for both of them to leave it for good.

Tune in to The Early Show Tuesday for the rest of Cowan's report.

"(It involves the use of) a pacemaker, very much like a cardiac pacemaker," explains Patricia Faris, PhD.

Implanted under one of their arms, the pacemaker sends an electrical shock every five minutes or so that researchers think re-regulates a key nerve that connects the brain with the stomach.

Sound uncomfortable? It is. A little.

"It feels a little like a cattle prod, you know," Eckstrom says, "you know, a woodpecker."

Nevertheless, every one of the 10 patients who have had it implanted so far as part of a clinical trial has shown improvement, Cowan points out.

"For people with very severe bulimia, it really is sort of the hope that they could get over that illness," Faris says.

Still, some doctors warn patients not to get too excited. This is only the first real test, they note.

"You need to have a randomized controlled trial," advocates Dr. Peter Lurie of the group Public Citizen. "Until the company has that, nothing intelligent can be said about whether this device works."

Still, Chris North, who used to spend hundreds of dollars a week at the grocery store in order to binge, says what happened when she went back to the store after the device was turned on was proof enough for her: "I called my friend and I was just giggling. I'm like, I can't believe I just went to the grocery store and all I walked out with was what I went in for."

All three hope the device can be turned off some day, and that the urges won't return. In the meantime, Cowan concludes, they've got their lives back, as long as the device, and the research, hold up.