Stomach butterflies scramble EGGs.

Stomach butterflies scramble EGGs Butterflies in your stomach aren't all in your head, according to Larry VandeCreek. Using an electrogastrograph, an external electrical monitoring device that is to the stomach what the electrocardiograph is to the heart, he and his colleagues at Ohio State University in Columbus have been able to measure the "butterflies." The technique is also being used to study other conditions, among them motion sickness, which Pennsylvania State University researchers have linked to erratic electrogastrograms (EGGs).

Like all muscles, the stomach muscle is stimulated by electricity. While the electrical signal in the stomach is minuscular compared with that in the heart, it can still be picked up by electrodes placed on the skin.

Electrical signals from the stomach were first measured in 1922, but the much stronger heart signal made external recording difficult. In the past several years, however, sophisticated electronics has enabled the stomach signal to be isolated from the heart's.

VandeCreek and his colleagues tested 20 people who claimed they were prone to stress-related stomach upsets, and 20 people who said they were not. In the study, which has not yet been published, electrodes were placed on the skin over the stomachs of fasting volunteers. The readings were initially identical, with amplitudes averaging 50 to 70 microvolts. But when the butterly sufferers were asked to imagine themselves in a stressful situation, their wave forms intensified to as much as 500 microvolts. "It's a little storm in there," VandeCreek says. Readings from people without the problem remained steady.

He and his colleagues are currently looking at anorexics; preliminary daa indicate they get butterflies just thinking about food. He also hopes to use the technique in biofeedback experimens to see if upset-stomach sufferers can be trained to normalize their stomach contractions.

Robert Stern at Penn State in University Park recently studied normal subjects sitting still within a rotating cylinder lined in black and white stripes. The EGGs of the 14 who suffered motion sickness went from a normal level of three electrical discharges (initiating three contractions) per minute to between live and eight. The others did not, he and his colleagues reported in the November 1985 AVIATION, SPACE, AND ENVIRONMENTAL MEDICINE. The readings returned to normal about nine minutes after the cylinder stopped.

Stern, who began working with EGGs 25 years ago, says the cylinder procedure could be used to screen astronaut candidates. NASA has sponsored some of his research, and "unofficially," beginning attempts to use EGGs in space have been made, he told SCIENCE NEWS.

Stern has done what he terms "very promising" preliminary work on using EGGs to increase resistance to motion sickness. By removing a person from a motion-sickness-inducing environment as soon as the EGG looks irregulat, which happens before the person feels ill, he hopes to break up the stimulus-response association and gradually increase the amount of time before the person get nauseated.