The cure for colon infections could be in the form of a pill filled with frozen feces.
Researchers found the feces pill, provided by unrelated donors, resolved diarrhea in in 90 percent of these cases, The JAMA Network Journals reported.
Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) is a "major" cause of illness and death across the globe and cases have been increasing. Common treatments are oral administration of the antibiotics metronidazole or vancomycin, but these pills have shown limited success. Fecal transplants are also a treatment option, but they can be risky and invasive. This new "poop pill" could help get past some of these roadblocks and move towards an effective treatment for colon infections.
Researchers prescribed fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) pills to 20 study subjects with recurrent CDI. Healthy donors were carefully screened in order to create the experimental pills. The patients received 15 consecutive capsule over the course of three days and were followed up for symptom relief and adverse events for six months following the treatment.
The team found 70 percent of the patients showed a resolution of diarrhea after the first administration of pills and remained symptom free for eight weeks. The six patients who did not respond to the first treatment were given a second round seven days after the first procedure, four obtained relief from diarrhea, giving the trial a 90 percent success rate.
"If reproduced in future studies with active controls, these results may help make FMT accessible to a wider population of patients, in addition to potentially making the procedure safer. The use of frozen inocula allows for screening of donors in advance. Furthermore, storage of frozen material allows retesting of donors for possible incubating viral infections prior to administration. The use of capsules obviates the need for invasive procedures for administration, further increasing the safety of FMT by avoiding procedure-associated complications and significantly reducing cost," the authors wrote.
The findings were published in a recent edition of JAMA.
