Reseachers found a new way to study gut bacteria - stool transplants.
While it sounds unappealing, this finding is exciting for patients with clostridium difficle infections (CDI) of the colon - a condition known for being difficult to treat fully with antibiotics.
Symptoms of CDI include watery diarrhea, fever, loss of appetite and nausea. These symptoms are less-than-pleasant, making many of those suffering from CDI welcome to this non-conventional treatment, reported Fox News.
"We were getting blockbuster rates of cure - people with multiple treatments of antibiotics who were still getting sick chronically, all of a sudden, 'Hey, I'm fine now,' because... of this natural intervention," Dr. Arun Swaminath, director of the inflammatory bowel disease program at Lenox Hill Hospital, told Fox News. "Most people thought, 'Oh, gross, poop,' but the population is exhausted and open to a new idea."
The stool transplant is the process of taking a healthy microbacterium from someone, liquifying it and transferring it into the sick environment of a patient - usually through the colon.
Healthy donors usually come from within the family since there aren't a lot of stool donors out there.
To perform the study Lenox Hill put out a request for stool donors in November to gather enough (30) samples for the experiment, reported Fox News. The researchers screened the donors through a questionnaire asking about any recurrent GI complaints, medications, probiotic use and active pregnancy to ensure they were healthy. From this data the researchers were able to create a baseline of what healthy gut bacteria looks like.
"You can imagine now, there's going to be a day when having a healthy microbiome from a business standpoint is going to be something marketable," Swaminath said to Fox News. "The old way of transferring stool from one person to another was clearly messy, unhygienic and unappealing - the next question is if I can figure out what is the relevant bacteria, put it into a pill, have you swallow it and get results."
