"There is no doubt that poo can save lives"

Coffeehouse for desis :: Coffeehouse :: Coffeehouse Main

Page 1 of 1

"There is no doubt that poo can save lives"

by Guest Tue Jul 19, 2016 8:44 pm

“There is no doubt that poo can save lives,” says Seth Bordenstein, a pathologist at Vanderbilt University, USA, in the press release for his recently published essay in PLOS Biology journal. The essay, co-authored by Diana Bojanova, is a succinct review of an emerging form of therapy for gastrointestinal disorders – faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT).

FMT involves transferring stool from one organism into the gastrointestinal tract of another. As bizarre as this may seem to the uninitiated, it turns out that this is quite the life-saving procedure. The human gut, after all, is a microbial zoo of sorts. The trillions of microorganisms that live in it, referred to as gut microbiota, play a crucial role in keeping it healthy. As described by Katrina Ray in a Nature editorial from 2012, “we are not just on ‘friendly’ terms with our gut bacteria—the relationship is infinitely more intimate than that—we are married to them.” So much that imbalances in the contents of the gut microbiota are strongly linked to potentially lethal conditions like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), cancer, obesity and cardiovascular diseases.

Naturally, one of the strategies used to maintain intestinal health involve replenishing the microbial environment of our guts. This replenishment can come in the form of probiotics which involve ingesting ‘good’ microbes in the form of food products like curd and commercial products like the fermented milk Yakut.

“However, probiotics are not derived from guts,” points out Dr. Sudeep Khanna, gastroenterologist at Apollo Hospitals, Delhi. This means that they are not an adequate representation of healthy gut microflora. On the other hand, stool, taken right from the intestine itself, is a much better representation, he says.

There lies the merit of FMT, wherein the intestines of a patient with a compromised gut microbiota is treated with a recipe of microbes sourced from healthy stool from a donor. The procedure did not gain instant popularity but from fewer than 10 publications per year until 2011, there has been a dramatic spurt of FMT related studies since then, with over 200 publications in 2015. This rise is presumably because of the more-or-less consistent good performance of patients involved in scattered trial studies around the world.

http://thewire.in/52669/faecal-transplants-gut-microbiota-infections/

Guest: Guest