Thursday, 26 December 2013

Fecal transplants are 'successful'

Fecal transplants have begun to be used as a treatment over the past year. Now a long-term study confirms transplants of stool microbes from healthy donors can successfully clear recurrent Clostridium difficile infections.

With fecal transplants (or 'fecal bacteriotherapy'), as the Digital Journal has previously reported, aim to restore the balance between good bacteria and bad bacteria in the colon.

The procedure involves either single to multiple infusions (e.g. by enema) of bacterial fecal flora originating from a healthy donor, or, as a recent Canadian study showed, fecal transplant in pill form.

Now further evidence has emerged, in a PLoS One paper, about the success of the method. The paper, the Scientist notes, showed that patients given fecal microbiota transplants to treat recurrent Clostridium difficile infections cleared the bacteria in just days, and their intestinal microbiota were restored nearly to a pre-C. diff state within a year.

The new study was undertaken by University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Institute for Genome Sciences and Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, who used advanced genetic sequencing to screen a range of patient samples.