A Cure that Involves Shoving Poop into Your Gut

I just learned about this recently after reading a chapter from our reference textbooks. Apparently fecal transplantation has been around since 1958 and has origins going way back in ancient times. The idea is introducing more normal gut flora into a patient’s gastrointestinal tract from a healthy donor.

The human gastrointestinal tract is a host for a lot of bacteria that helps us digest our food, produce vitamins, and help our immune system. When we take in antibiotics for other infections, not only do we kill the pathogenic ones but also the good ones. This leaves more room for opportunistic infections to invade and grow now that the area has been vacated.

Clostridium difficile is a common pathogen ubiquitous in nature and targets the immunocompromised patients. Fecal transplant for recurring C. difficile infections become viable because you can’t keep using the same antibiotics because you risk creating antibiotic resistance to not only C. difficile but also other bacteria existing in your system.

Now I’m not going to drill in technical and fancy science words here for the sake of a trivia. The gist of the post has already been said on the above paragraphs.

John Hopkins is a known institution that does this and they shared some general procedures in screening who is qualified to be a poop donor, the patient that can benefit from the procedure, how the procedure is generally done without expounding the technical stuff.

Reading other articles exploring the topic, there’s also already plenty of data to support that this procedure is safe and effective. It’s not a popular procedure but I wouldn’t be surprised if I happen to attend a future seminar here about its viability especially when antibiotic resistance is a common problem by the year 2030 and up.

The rate of resistance common pathogens develop against our antibiotics is more rapid than the antibiotics we develop and we’re decades behind in the race. It’s actually a scary subject once you get into the rabbit hole and that’s going to be the next generation’s problem. We can’t escape that fate though, we will eventually get old, have chronic debilitating diseases or be immunocompromised where we have to face the risk of getting superbugs.

If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.

Posted with STEMGeeks