3 Gut Health Breakthroughs That Relieve Pain and Ease Digestion

Swallowing an electronic, gas-sensing capsule helped Alice Smith (not her real name), 64, pinpoint the cause of the chronic constipation that had bothered her for decades. 

“I took one big gulp of water,” says Smith, a school speech pathologist who lives in the Northeast. “It went down very easily.”

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At 1.1 inches long and 0.4 inches wide, the Atmo Gas Capsule houses sensors that track its location, its speed of movement and the force and frequency of muscle contractions along the human body’s 30-foot-long digestive tract, sending data to a receiver the user wears on a belt. 

This information can help people with common digestive problems — and their doctors — get a clearer picture of the cause and receive more effective treatments, says Dr. Eric Goldstein, a clinical instructor at the Icahn School of Medicine at New York City’s Mount Sinai Health System.

“The capsule can really help you fine-tune your treatment for the patient, not by only confirming the diagnosis you suspected or denying it but by finding things you weren’t necessarily looking for,” says Goldstein, who is Smith’s gastroenterologist.

Approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2025, the capsule helps diagnose chronic constipation — which affects up to 30 percent of older adults — as well as gastroparesis, when stomach muscles slow down or stop moving food along to your small intestine. 

Conventional tests involve consuming food with radioactive tracers or taking a capsule, then having images taken over several hours or even days, Goldstein says. “It’s just very inconvenient,” he adds.

The Atmo capsule shows “whole gut transit time” — how long food stays in the stomach, small intestine and large intestine. Total transit time was 22 to 41 hours in a 2022 study of healthy people, although up to 73 hours is still within the normal range.

Other research is using the Atmo capsule to get a better picture of how the gut microbiome responds to special diets and what happens in the body during time-restricted eating.

For Smith, the capsule’s results ruled out transit-time problems, leading to tests showing she has dyssynergia — when muscles and nerves aren’t working together to produce a bowel movement. 

Smith is now undergoing pelvic floor therapy, using biofeedback to retrain key muscles, taking a fiber supplement and using diazepam suppositories to relax her muscles. 

“I am going to the bathroom,” she says. “I definitely feel better about that.”

More advances in digestive health

Breakthrough: Drug combo eases inflammatory bowel disease

For people with treatment-resistant Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, an experimental combination therapy of two drugs — the biologics golimumab and guselkumab — boosted odds for continued remission after 48 weeks, compared with taking just one drug, according to recent clinical trials.

On the horizon: Robot pill snaps gut photos

The experimental PillBot is a tiny robot with a camera and light packed into a capsule. Once commercially available, it can be mailed to a consumer’s home, where it’s swallowed. A physician in another location controls the robot’s journey through the digestive system.