Feces transplant may help relieve severe diarrhea
2013 Jan 17, 1:07am 15,445 views 47 comments
by zzyzzx follow (9)
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Tenpoundbass
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2013 Jan 17, 1:33am
There was a story in the news about a procedure done last year sometime involved this.
This is actually an important milestone. Fecal transplants will become standard soon to treat all kinds of chronic conditions where the gut may be involved.
leo707
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2013 Jan 17, 2:00am
Yep, this procedure has been around for quite a few years. It is a perfect example of a procedure that is cheaper and more effective than the drugs used to treat the same problems. However, it is little known because there is not much money to be made in selling poop-transplants and a lot of money to be lost in pharmaceutical sales.
zzyzzx
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2013 Jan 23, 10:51am
However, it is little known because there is not much money to be made in selling poop-transplants and a lot of money to be lost in pharmaceutical sales.
Plus this poop transplant procedure has DIY potential.
Shaman
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2013 Jan 23, 10:54am
This "movement" (pun intended) has been gaining steam for years. Antibiotics have screwed up so many people who now suffer from IBS, constipation, and diarrhea that a better treatment was becoming obvious. If you have the wrong bacteria in your gut, get the right sort from your friend and start living better. It's kind of a "duh" thing that the medical mafia is no longer able to fully suppress.
curious2
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2013 Jan 23, 10:57am
Other animals learned this on their own, long ago, with no medical degrees at all:
Dogs and monkeys do the same. The dog owners are shocked, but the dogs are following their noses to find what they need. It's a balance of risks - e.g. there might be parasites - but it doesn't cost anything so there's been no $ for studies.
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http://health.yahoo.net/news/s/nm/feces-transplant-may-help-relieve-severe-diarrhea
A small new study has concluded that inserting fecal material from a healthy person into the gut of someone with severe diarrhea may cure their problem more effectively than antibiotics.
One transplant of fecal material from a volunteer - with its mix of healthy bacteria - resolved severe diarrhea in 13 out of 16 volunteers. Standard treatment with an antibiotic, in comparison, worked in four of 13 patients.
"I've done 90 of these now in the last four and a half years. In patient after patient who has failed multiple courses of antibiotic, if you give them a dose of stool, they get better," she told Reuters Health.
Keller and his colleagues compared three treatments in a small trial.
Thirteen volunteers with C. diff received a standard antibiotic, vancomycin, four times a day for 14 days. After 10 weeks, four were free of bacteria-related diarrhea.
Another 13 patients had the same drug therapy after drinking a solution to clean out the bowel, a process known as bowel lavage that is similar to what people go through if they are getting a colonoscopy. That worked in three cases.
The remaining 16 volunteers had a brief treatment with vancomycin, combined with bowel lavage, followed by the infusion of 500 milliliters of diluted donor feces through a tube that went into the nose, down the throat, past the stomach and into the small intestine.
In the three cases where that treatment failed, the doctors re-treated patients with fecal material from a different donor. That worked in all but one case.
Among the volunteers in the non-transplant groups who had a relapse of C. diff, 18 were later given a fecal transplant. It cured 15 of them, although four of the 15 needed two treatments.
When side effects were tallied in the transplant group, 94 percent of patients reported diarrhea, 31 percent had cramping and 19 percent had belching, but all of those symptoms disappeared within three hours. Nineteen percent ultimately reported constipation after treatment.