OT: How's your micrbiota doing, AKA your gut bugs, are they good?

The good vs bad bugs in our gut, and possible implications for over all health and immunity, has been discussed here before. And also discussed has been what happens when we wipe out the "good" bugs with antibiotics. And possible benefits- if any- of probiotics. I just saw this about a pilot RCT(10 intervention, 10 placebo) with pretty spectacular results after ORAL fecal implants( I know, yuck) from a "healthy" donor. Donations collected from one man: "Cornberg said that he was concerned about reliance on a single donor for the transplant. "You can get a certain amount of capsules from one donor, but eventually this needs to be more generalizable. I think we have to find out what is in that sample and reproduce it. But I think this may be an opportunity for these patients."

Bajaj said that, in fact, the so-called "super pooper" – a 36-year-old man – is no longer supplying stool for the project. He experienced an infection and has been taken out of the poop loop, he said............"

But the results were about as impressive as these things get. "In a 6-month pilot study in which 10 patients took the pills with donated stool and another 10 patients with recurrent hepatic encephalopathy received placebo, serious adverse events – hospitalization or death – occurred in six patients on placebo and one patient taking the active pill (P=0.03), Jasmohan Bajaj, MD, MBBS, associate professor of medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond.

The six patients on placebo actually had 11 events, compared to a single episode among the patients receiving the active ingredients (P=0.02)......................
"We did not have any safety issues," Bajaj said. "Remember these are patients who are immune compromised so the last thing we want to do is to introduce something infectious to their gut that could make them worse."

In addition to a significant reduction in hospitalizations, he said that treatment with the fecal microbial transplant capsules was associated with favorable changes in mucosal and stool microbial composition and enhancement of the small intestinal barrier.

"In short," he said, "the way to the brain is through the gut."

"There is really a need to treat these cirrhotic patients because if they get infections the mortality can be as high as 20% to 30% in one month, ......................................

Bajaj said the disease being treated with fecal microbial transplant are suffering from a serious condition. "These people suffer recurrent bouts of this disease and every time they have encephalopathy a bit of their brain is lost," he said.

"Fecal microbial transplant has been used often in Closteridium difficile, but that is a very different animal than recurrent hepatic encephalopathy," he said. "C. difficile is an infectious disease that is localized in the gut; whereas cirrhosis is a systemic disease which affect virtually every organ. We wanted to find out whether this system could impact outcomes outside the liver and fix some of the defects."

Previous studies in which fecal transplant had been performed using enema techniques had shown effectiveness in improving cognition, he said, "But put yourself in the patients' position, would you rather take a capsule than have something shoved up your butt? Capsules could also affect the small intestine a place where the enema could not reach," Bajaj said. "This was done under FDA guidance – which made sure that every capsule was 'good (you know what)'," he said.

The fecal microbial transplant material was obtained from a stool bank that had identified the "super pooper" – donor material enriched in beneficial organisms. The super donor had gastrointestinal bacteria in the stool that were considered helpful and were generally missing from the gut biota of the patients.............................".

So, there are places called "stool banks"? Where stool is saved and stored?

I am just wondering if they will be able to get a patent on the "good stuff" and charge megabucks for it?

Also, has this "stuff", potentially readily available from healthy donors- as some folks are literally full of it - actually beat out (in this small test) their best medications, which usually come with SEs?


[url]https://chsnurse.mednewsplus.com/Topic/899/ArticleEmailed/80396?userguid=503d55e9-644d-4af5-b308-a505cc7d189c"

From a website:

"Going by the facts, humans are 90% microbial but only 10% human. The average human has over 100 trillion microbes in and on his body."

Mindboggling.

And one more mindboggler, from another site: "... and a nonillion (ten to the 30th power) individual bacterial and archaeal cells on earth."

Simple fecal transplants do wonders for cases of severe ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease.

Actually it's a rectal fecal implant. Is that better, Jim?

In terms of delivery, for patients with ulcerative colitis, the FMT must be administered to the colon, whereas for patients with Crohn's disease, the FMT can be administered via tablets or the nasogastric route, as these patients usually have terminal ileal disease.

Post Edited (garyi) : 4/16/2019 3:23:29 PM (GMT-6)