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Gut Bacteria Cocktail May End Need for Fecal Transplants
sciencehabit writes "A tonic of gut microbes may be the secret recipe for treating a common hospital scourge. Researchers have pinpointed the exact mix of microbes required to cure mice of chronic infection by Clostridium difficile. The hard-to-treat bacterium infects alomst 336,000 in the US each year and causes bloating, pain, & diarrhea. A similar bacterial cocktail may be able to replace the current controversial treatment involving the intake of a healthy person's fecal matter to restore the right balance of microbes in the gut."
I'd never heard of this before, and I still wish I hadn't.
Kefir is even better, but hard to monetize so it's less common. Get some, keep a large jar and replenish with milk as required.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Yogurt is basically the same process, hell they have successfully monetized bottled water.
Do not underestimate the laziness of the average American.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Friday night entertainment
Gently reply
Eating yogurt is the same as "intake of a healthy person's fecal matter?"
Source, please.
This kind of treatment has been tested before and is an exciting possibility, but there have been failures in the past. Also, this is nothing like the yogurt cultures you know.
...... and idiots rule the world....
To get an idea of how gut bacteria are that important: we are made of about 10e13 human cells, and we contain 10e14 gut bacterial, for about 2 kg of mass. Let a subset of the gut bacteria population become hostile pathogens, and you see that we can easily be outnumbered by attackers.
Science is just starting to discover how the body as an ecosystem functions. We still have a lot of progress to make from wiping out all bacteria and relying on broad-spectrum antibodies.
The amazing thing about the bacterial ecosystem is how even different parts of your skin can be colonized by completely different types of bacteria, even just a few inches apart. There are symbiotic relationships just among the bacteria, and other bacteria which are several degrees removed from directly relying on our host bodies. It's a fascinating area of study, but one which is difficult, because it's impossible to isolate and study the bugs individually.
It's not inserted into the stomach. Whoever wrote that doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, or is listening to someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. It's inserted into the small bowel via the colon using the same equipment used in colonoscopies. And it's not controversial. If you have C. diff, you are suffering so horribly that grossness of the procedure just doesn't enter the equation. And the fecal transplant method is incredibly effective, and incredibly quick to solve the problem. People who have been in agony for weeks get so much better in a few hours they can be discharged from the hospital. The only issue is that fecal transplants aren't yet covered by insurance. But they aren't that expensive, less than a grand out of pocket.
Eating yogurt is the same as "intake of a healthy person's fecal matter?"
Source, please.
It's not the same. It only contains one of the species of common intestinal bacteria that keep your gut happy. But sometimes just reestablishing a colony of that one is enough to help a lot with intestinal problems.
Kefir is even better, but hard to monetize so it's less common. Get some, keep a large jar and replenish with milk as required.
It didn't cross your mind that if you were actually correct, the researcher - who is presumably at least reasonably competent inside the field in which they are working - would have been culturing the microbes from yoghurt or kefir?
Right now, the evidence provided means the 'yoghurt or kefir are just as good' claim carries as much weight as the claim that homeopathic vaccines are as effective as real vaccines.
Eating yogurt is the same as "intake of a healthy person's fecal matter?"
I've always felt that way -- minus the "healthy" part.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Yeah, but yogurt tastes like shit.
Do they call it a brain transplant?
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Hell, so it really is an actual treatment. I would never have surmised it. Pardon the crassness in the first sentence of my original comment, but it seemed ludicrous at first. Inadvertent education, ..who'd a thunk it.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
News for Turds
Stuff that Splatters
People who have been in agony for weeks get so much better in a few hours they can be discharged from the hospital. The only issue is that fecal transplants aren't yet covered by insurance.
That should be a pretty easy decision to make though... hospital stays aren't cheap (and I assume are covered by insurance in the US?) and a decent infection of clostridium difficile can kill you and make you very expensive to take care of while you die.
The only issue is that fecal transplants aren't yet covered by insurance.
This, and the fact that it may just be a temporary cure if the patient has a weak immunity: the same cause may make the same effects.
This may be true, but does your gut really get affected that much by your immune system? I know it does it various auto-immune diseases but that is the opposite to what you are describing. From what i've read the balance of bacteria in your gut is supposed to regulate itself but the bad bacteria can move in after the patient has had a heavy does of antibiotics to treat other infections.
Unless you were implying that the weak immunity requires heavy doses of antibiotics to treat recurring infections? I guess that makes sense, but just follow up each dose with a reverse enema of poop :)
If I'm unfortunate to get this illness, please don't tell me the cure.
If you are unfortunate enough to get this illness you will welcome the cure with open bowels.
but does your gut really get affected that much by your immune system?
Yes, a lot. The gut is the major organ involved with immunity. We are constantly sampling gut bacterial antigens, producing antibodies against the species that grow too much
Thyroïd problems impact gut immunity, and a low thyroid function is strongly associated with Candida Albicans proliferation, for instance
.
I gotta wonder, why not take it as a pill with an enteric coating for $0.50 rather than $1000?
Only medicine could bill $1000 for putting a bit of shit into someone's intestine.
This research doesn't show the only way or all the ways your gut flora can be restored after (treating) a C dif infection. It describes one way and proves its claim without ruling any other treatments out. Put another way, this research does not disprove the effectiveness of any rememdies not explicitly covered and should not be assumed to evaluate their individual effectivenesses.
The key idea is intentionally augmenting the gut's flora with probiotics so that restoration of beneficial native flora can occur more rapidly. The paper points to specific strains which are required to attain the effectiveness of a fecal transfer. L bacillus and acidophilus may not cure your C dif infection or instantly restore homeostasis, but they'll significantly help restore your ability to properly receive nutrients from digested food. While more palatable than eating poo, they're simply not as efffective because they don't represent all the necessary flora. They are, however, still effective and recommended as treatments.
While theirs was not an accurate or well supported claim, please recognize that the comment you responded to contained more truth than your dissmissively out of hand rebuttal. Also, don't try to appeal to authority when there is evidence against your assertion that probiotics are equivalent to homeopathy.
Yoghurt efficiency is not homeopathic lie.
From the "Québec Nationnalle health agency", an official document (PDF, French), page 36.
.
(Google traduction)"On primary prevention, in a recent double-blind presented American College of Gastroenterology where 44 patients who had a yogurt enriched lactobacilli were compared with 45 patients with placebo, the incidence of diarrhea was significantly lower in the group with probiotic (p = 0.01). However, in view specifically of diarrhea associated with Clostridium difficile, the difference between the groups was less significant (1 patient in the probiotic group vs 7 in the placebo group had an episode of CDAD, p = 0.058)."
Or lots of garlic, black pepper, some lemon juice, and bunch of lamb kabobs and flat bread. Mmm mmm baaa!
"It's not going in that end."
Generally, the root cause of a C. Diff infection is the course of antibiotics given to the the patient to treat another ailment. Once the course has concluded the normal diversity of gut flora is no longer present and the opportunity for C. Diff to overpopulate the gut arises. C. Diff is resistant to most antibiotics due to having a cyst phase in its life cycle that enables the bacteria to live on surfaces outside the bowel. Treatment with certain antibiotics including Flagyl or Vancomyacin may kill the C. Diff bacteria in the bowel but will also kill any other resident gut flora at the same time. If the patient comes in contact with C. Diff immediately following this second antibiotic course the infection will likely return. Often the physician will recommend live culture yogurt and other probiotics be ingested even during the C. Diff antibiotic treatment to promote a diversity of gut flora the moment the antibiotics are discontinued. This is not always successful and the treatment may have to repeated several times.
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A researcher once tried to test me. I ate his shit with some fava beans and a nice gut bacteria cocktail... (slurpslurp)
"Your gut naturally contains E. Coli, and Enterococcus, neither of which you want to get from the grocery store."
Grocery store?
I know a local restaurant where you can get a fecal matter cocktail for years now.
I would never ever wish C-Diff on anyone, not even my worst enemy. After the wife was put on broad spectrum antibiotics for an ear infection, then came what we thought was a bit of the flu or stomach virus (a.k.a. the trotts). Never-ending trotts. After exploratory colonoscopy & cultures to verify, & several different rounds of antibiotics, what finally worked for us was one last round of antibiotics combined with an insane intake of yogurt & probiotics (as we were finishing off the antibiotics). I think it was the combination that worked for us. We now start a (paranoid) regimen of yogurt & pro-biotics whenever someone is on antibiotics. Would we have gone for the "shit enema" (as unappealing as that sounds)? Perhaps. Let me put it this way, after weeks of the most debilitating pain (doubled over in pain), not eating for days, and blood literally pouring out your hind end, you are ready to grasp at anything that might work. Wife said that child birth had nothing on the C-Diff pains (& she went through 2 births with not so much as an aspirin -- another story. . .). I'll joke about a lot of things, but not this. So if this works (faster), more power to it. Oh yeah, cases of C-Diff are on the rise -- yay ( http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletters/Harvard_Mens_Health_Watch/2010/June/clostridium-difficile-an-intestinal-infection-on-the-rise & http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/03/06/148072242/deaths-from-dangerous-gut-bacteria-hit-historic-highs ).
Eating yogurt is not a homeopathic remedy. Look up what homeopathic means.
Eating yogurt is a simple treatment, and as the grandparent's quote indicates it is significantly effective at reducing the incidence of diarrhea in cases of gut flora loss (due to antibiotics usually). However, it is significantly less effective when the problem is specifically c.difficile overgrowth.
So if you're taking antibiotics, get a probiotic yogurt, it is likely to help. If you do end up with c. diff, you may need another type of treatment.
Do not underestimate the laziness of the average American.
A common and largely incorrect sentiment suggesting you just have never bothered to think it through all the way. The brilliant realization that drove bottled water out of the original, much smaller Evian market (remember all those hipster T-shirts from the 90's that spelled it backward?) and into the world of Dasani (which is merely the filtered water used by your local Coca-Cola bottler) was that water is widely available for free, but cold water that you can carry with you was not. You could, of course, choose to carry your own water bottle, which many people do when going to the gym or other predictable activity, but on a long journey this is not a good solution. You might choose to carry a cooler and fill it with ice and a few bottles of cold water that you would refill at leisure, if traveling by car, but even then that's a lot of work (and if you have to replenish ice, a bag is likely to cost more than several liters of water, especially if you get the cheaper brands). If traveling by air, bottles of chilled water are nearly the only method to achieve this goal (due to the restrictions on liquids). And if you're flying somewhere, why worry about the tiny additional cost of a couple of bottles of water compared to the hundreds of dollars you spent to get there?
The same logic explains why a two liter bottle of soda at room temperature sells for the same price as a chilled half-liter bottle of the same stuff in a gas station. You are mostly paying for portability (i.e., it fits in your car cupholder) and chilling, not the liquid inside. You can get a better deal by buying fountain drinks, but they go flat faster and have a much higher risk of spill than a bottle with a screw-on cap.
"I have no idea what I'm taking about, and I was in too much of a rush to First-Post so I did not bother to read the article. But I made an anti-American remark, and I was snotty, therefore, I'm an instant Slashdot expert! Modded up to 'insightful'".
What sort of fools modded this up?
By the way, if you had bothered to read the article, the research is at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. In the UK. That's not in the US, that's across the Atlantic Ocean, way on the other side.
I think you underestimated your own laziness.
These are also performed via upper rather than lower endoscopy, with the gastroscope passed via the mouth and past the stomach into the small bowel, for the reason that a simple enema has an unacceptably high risk of being expelled before it can take root - these people are suffering from massive diarrhea, after all. That's how the GI docs I know do it. It's a simple procedure whose major risk is the yuck factor.
Yeah, the laziness of the average American is why we work longer hours than most developed nations and have higher productivity. Try again.
Citation. You can find dozens more if you were not too lazy to look ;)
All what's needed is the patient making their own, home-made goat kefir (if they're not terribly allergic to dairy -- although even dairy allergies are a para-symptom of wheat allergy in reality). Kefir's 43 different bacteria and yeasts can kill CDiff, and it's being shown to do so in research (Minnesota university professor/doctor tried it recently too). But the kefir must be home-made (bottled ones don't include the full spectrum of bacteria/yeasts because of bottling regulations regarding alcohol the yeasts create), it must be from goat, sheep or buffalo milk (for less casein irritation, as the A2 casein is more compatible with humans), and it must be fermented for 24 hours (to minimize the amount of lactose ingested). Two-three cups a day of kefir (with a few berries in it, maybe with some pine and walnut nuts, also maybe with some raw, unfiltered and local honey too), and CDiff should be back in check within 3-4 days. No need for antibiotics, for pill probiotics, or doctors for that matter.
Wow, wait a second here! If you take probiotics such as yogurt while there are still antibiotics in your body, some of the probiotic bacteria are likely to evolve full or partial resistance and that increases the chance of passing that resistance to pathogenic bacteria entering the gut later through horizontal gene transfer. It seems intellectually lazy that you are discounting this serious risk!
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