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Woman Suffers Significant Weight Gain After Fecal Transplant

Beeftopia (1846720) writes In a case reported in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases, a woman suffering from a drug-resistant intestinal infection gained 36 pounds after receiving a fecal transplant from her overweight daughter. Previous mouse studies have shown thin mice gain weight after ingesting fecal bacteria from obese mice. The woman previously was not overweight. After the procedure, despite a medically supervised liquid protein diet and exercise regimen, the woman remained obese. Her doctor said, "She came back about a year later and complained of tremendous weight gain... She felt like a switch flipped in her body, to this day she continues to have problems... as a result I'm very careful with all our donors don't use obese people."

4 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. Re:what about skinny people? by fustakrakich · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Now you have me wondering if we can make dumb people smart, and mean people nice. We may achieve world peace through fecal transplants.

    --
    “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
  2. Re:Okay, so... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Figure out which bacteria the obese patients have in common

    They've done some perliminary studies, and one major difference is the proportion of Firmicutes to Bacteroides. Fewer Bacteroides and more Firmicutes are correlated with being obese. Those are borad classes, though, and not particular strains, and it's not clear if it's the presense of Firmicutes, or the abscence of Bacteroides which is related to obesity.

      Bacteroides likes to eat complex polysaccharides, like those found in many plants, so it's speculated (but not known) that a diet high in plant polysaccharides would promote the presence of Bacteroides, and correspondingly reduce the number of Firmicutes

  3. Re:Okay, so... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The whole point is many skinny people violate this law but do not get obese.

    I do and the way I eat absolutely upsets a few larger people I know.

    burgers, doughnuts, eating out a lot, snacking all the time, yet I'm a solid 155lbs at 5'11 with a desk job as a software developer sitting all day. Nothing I do changes my weight and I'm a very small framed athletic looking individual who takes about 2 shits a day if it matters to anyone.

    I also drink loads of coffee and soda, then sit around idle and program.

    So the law is kinda bullshit for some of us.... This whole bacteria talk is about trying to bestow traits like mine unto people who can't lose weight without literally starving it out of them with your "law".

  4. Re:Have I lost my mind? by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Where do babies get them from? Surely there is no interintestinal transfer from mom to womb.

    The child's intestine gets colonized during childbirth. That's been discovered to be one of the problems with Caesarian section, in fact. The baby's large intestine doesn't get the proper bacterial colonization.