Follow Your Gut by Rob Knight

Author:Rob Knight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster/ TED

Fecal Transplants

Sometimes, though, you just have to rip out your lawn and lay down fresh sod.

People with severe gastrointestinal illness can literally crap themselves to death. One such disease is Clostridium difficile–associated diarrhea. People with C. diff have to go to the bathroom dozens of times a day, and the disease is often life threatening. It’s also one of the most prevalent hospital-acquired infections in the United States, where each year it sickens 337,000 people and kills 14,000 of them.13

Many people take antibiotics for C. diff, but this therapy often fails. A complement or possibly an alternative to antibiotic treatment is instead to give the patient microbes from someone who’s healthy. One radical and experimental C. diff treatment is called fecal transplantation. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a healthy volunteer, usually a relative, donates a stool sample, which is then diluted and given to the patient. There are two ways to transplant the feces: the northern route and the southern route. Both routes are effective, curing 90 percent of C. diff patients.14

Work I did in collaboration with microbiologist Mike Sadowsky and physician Alex Khoruts, both at the University of Minnesota, showed that initially C. diff patients have stool communities that look nothing like those of healthy adults, and their fecal microbes resemble those in the skin or vagina. However, within a few days of their fecal transplant, their gut communities are restored to normal, and their symptoms vanish. Fecal transplantation has the power to restore the whole microbial ecosystem in the gut. So far it’s been attempted only in dire cases of C. diff. But its success has been remarkable, and researchers are very interested in discovering what other conditions it might help. In the lab, as we’ve mentioned earlier, we’ve seen that fecal transplants can cure obesity in mice. It’ll be exciting to see if we can apply these findings to human therapies.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.