garylouisville said...
Colitis is short term bowel problems caused by something that is usually known, you correct it, and poof, your condition is gone and may never come back. A C-Diff infection is just one thing that can give you colitis but once the C-Diff is gone your colitis is gone. FMT has a high success rate for treating C-Diff or other problems causing colitis which aren't due to autoimmune disease. If you have the flu and are having a lot of diarrhea you could say that you have colitis and it will eventually resolve itself once you don't have the flu anymore, but you did not have ulcerative colitis.
Ulcerative colitis is thought to be an autoimmune disease where your immune system has run amok and your body starts attacking itself. It's cause is never known, it has no cure, and has periods of flares and periods of remissions throughout your entire life. Some UC patients can get C-Diff on top of UC and have to fight both. Once the C-Diff is gone you still have UC. FMT has a low success rate with UC and I suspect that some of the UC cases where FMT worked were not actually UC cases at all but misdiagnosed colitis cases. With UC the result of the disease is that you have a microbiome imbalance in your gut but it is your body attacking itself which causes it. By doing an FMT it might be possible to bring your gut balance back into balance it doesn't solve the root cause of the disease which is the body's immune system attacking itself. While FMT might temporarily make a UC patient better when their systems are rebalanced, more than likely your body's immune system attack will eventually have you back to square one, requiring FMT's at regular intervals, just as a person on biologics have to get treatments at regular intervals in order to maintain remission. It is highly unlikely that a person with true UC would get long term benefit from one round of FMT's.
thanks. Do you think UC caused by antibiotics or acne medication would respond to FT