Ready for your crapsule? Faecal transplants could play a huge role in future medicine

s a nation, we British are obsessed with our gut function, largely because it has never been unhealthier. I spend large parts of my working day talking to patients about their bowel habits, and many of them want to talk about little else. There is also a deeper, more fundamental fascination with the digestive system; the colon is a national source of comedy that has kept us going through every crisis since the beginning of time.

To help persuade you that this might not be such a terrible idea, I’ll tell you the tale of a patient. Raymond had driven the No 7 bus between Oxford Circus and East Acton from the age of 20 until taking early retirement in his mid-40s after learning he had genetic heart problems. He gave up his job on his doctor’s orders. Like you and me, and everyone else on the planet, Ray was a host to several trillion microbes that lived in and on his body.

Ray was readmitted to St Mary’s critically unwell and was soon diagnosed with Clostridium difficile infection . A “hospital-acquired infection”, this disease is a complication of 20th-century medicine and an unintended consequence of Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, the first effective mass-produced antibiotic, in 1928. It is a global problem that afflicts 500,000 people in the United States each year and it kills 29,000 of them.

It may be like turning a computer on and off again – it’s a complete reset of the gut’s immunology software It’s also becoming clear that samples from some donors are much more effective than those from others. These are known as “super donors” and their faeces seems to contain a magical ingredient that makes it particularly effective. But we don’t understand why this happens, or whose poo will be most effective.

Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)

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