The very thought of getting someone elses poop transfused in your body may make you cringe but stool transplant has not only helped patients with gastrointestinal tract issues, it has also saved those who have had bone marrow transplants.

At Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospitals Centre of Excellence in Infectious Diseases and Department of Haematology, Pune, seven of the 11 patients of bone marrow transplants developed Clostridium difficile infection. They were treated with faecal microbial transplant (FMT), also referred to as stool transplant, over the past year.

Research worldwide has shown that a faecal transplant can restore healthy bacteria in the lower intestine which can help control Clostridium difficile or C. diff. According to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, FMT can be more effective than antibiotics for keeping C. diff in check in some cases.

Since C. diff infection can recur and cause colitis (inflammation in the colon), FMT restores good and healthy bacteria, said Dr Parikshit Prayag, infectious disease consultant and in-charge of the Centre of Excellence in Infectious Diseases at Deenanath Mangeshkar hospital.

Dr Sameer Melinkeri, head of the department of haemotology at the hospital, said C. diff infection-related diarrhoea can occur in a normal setting in which antibiotics can be used for treatment. However, antibiotic treatment for recurrent infections can involve one or more courses of medication and their effectiveness comes down with each subsequent bout. FMT can arrest such infections post bone marrow transplant as it can be life-threatening, he added.

FMT is also done for certain disease conditions like Graft vs host disease (GvHD). Most people who undergo a bone marrow transplant suffer from blood cancer. Graft vs host disease can occur at any time after an allogeneic transplant where the donated bone marrow or peripheral stem cells can attack the recipients body. It can develop in the GI tract, skin or liver, Dr Prayag said.

Latest research published in the Journal of International Medical Research and others has shown how FMT is a promising treatment for patients with steroid-resistant GvHD. We have seen clinically relevant results in six of our patients, Dr Prayag said.

So, who can be donors? They are selected based on certain parameters. They should not be immune-compromised or have taken antibiotics over the past six months, says Dr Sampada Patwardhan, head of the department of microbiology at the hospital. Donor screening has to be done carefully. We need to rule out infections, she said.

Procedures on the transplant delivery methods may vary like colonoscopy and use of nasojejunal tube. The recovery may take a week or more and in most cases there are at least two weekly installations of the stool (in liquid form).

Very few centres conduct FMT and among them, the centre at Deenanath Hospital actively treats cases involving bone marrow transplants. At a recent virtual meeting of the International Society of Blood Transfusion, Dr Prayag made a strong case for encouraging stool transplants. The condition of C. diff is also underdiagnosed in the country as there isnt adequate infrastructure to correctly detect the problem, he pointed out.

In fact, FMT is being touted as a treatment option for many gut health issues. In an opinion article published on June 30 in the journal Trends in Molecular Medicine, a team from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Womens Hospital (BWH) proposes that individuals bank samples of their own gut microbiota when they are young and healthy for potential use later in life in an autologous FMT.

A report in Science Daily quotes corresponding author Yang-Yu Liu, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard and an associate scientist in the Channing Division of Network Medicine at BWH, as saying, The idea of rewilding the human microbiome has taken off in recent years and has been hotly debated from medical, ethical and evolutionary perspectives. It is still unknown if people in industrialized societies can gain some health benefit by restoring their microbiome to an ancestral state. In this paper, we proposed a way to rejuvenate the human gut microbiome.

The report also listed OpenBiome, a non-profit stool bank based in Somerville, Massachusetts, as the first stool bank to offer an option for individuals to bank their own stool for future treatment of C. diff infection. Yang and his colleagues are now looking at if this treatment can be used for other diseases.

Conceptually, the idea of stool banking for autologous FMT is similar to when parents bank their babys cord blood for possible future use. However, there is greater potential for stool banking, and we anticipate that the chance of using stool samples is much higher than for cord blood. But there are many practical issues to implementing this idea, Yang is quoted as saying, hinting at optimal storage and cryopreservation issues.

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Cutting Edge: Poop therapy can save your gut, and your life - The Indian Express