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Fecal Transplants

When I read a story like this I always wonder about the first person who gave this a try. 

Before she got so sick with a Clostridium difficile infection, Vicki Doriott would have been as disgusted as anyone at the idea of a fecal transplant.

Infuse her gut with someone else’s stool? Through a tube in her nose? No, thanks.

But in June 2004, Doriott was actually relieved to show up at a Duluth, Minn., clinic, where doctors sent samples of her husband’s excrement sliding into her stomach – and apparently cured the infection that threatened to ruin her life.

“When those toxins are in your body, you kind of feel like you’re close to death,” said Doriott, 52, an accountant from Eau Claire, Wis., who spent nearly six months battling recurrent bouts of the nasty intestinal bug known as C. diff.  “Nothing else I tried worked.”

Doriott is among a growing number of people who’ve undergone the seemingly gross procedure in a last ditch effort to restore normal bowel function after severe, recurrent C. diff infection. The little-known technique gained new fame last month when an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” highlighted the quirky cure that helps 85 percent of those willing to try it.

[...]

Since 2002, they’ve performed 64 poop transfers on patients with two or more incurable bouts of C. diff. It’s a technique first documented in the early 1990s by researchers in Norway investigating the best way to treat C. diff infection, which typically occurs when the normal flora in the gut is disturbed, most often by antibiotic use.

Rates of C. diff are skyrocketing in the U.S., where a recent study found 13 of every 1,000 patients in the nation’s hospitals are infected or colonized with the germ.

The antibiotics destroy good bacteria in the colon, allowing the C. diff to flourish. The bug can cause illnesses ranging from severe diarrhea and colitis to blood infection, and in worst cases, death. Most patients with C. diff can control it with powerful antibiotics such as metronidazole, sold as Flagyl, or vancomycin. But in about 20 percent of the cases, even those strong drugs don’t work.

[...]

Typically, patients ask a close household member, usually a spouse, to produce a sample of stool, which is tested for disease and infection. In Doriott’s case, her husband, Jerry, 50, a civil engineer, was on tap.

On the day of the transplant, donors provide the feces, which is blended and filtered. A tube is fed through the patient’s nose into the stomach and several teaspoons of the sample are injected through it.

“I refused to look at it,” said Doriott. “All I felt was a coolness. It didn’t smell.”

Posted by Owen at 0709 hrs
Technology

1. “...which typically occurs when the normal flora in the gut is disturbed, most often by antibiotic use.”

   Hmmm, which is worse? A fecal transfer or eating a lot of yogurt?

   Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 11, 2008 at 1437 hrs
   
   
   

2. Hmmmmm,

   Kind of like trying to solve a debt/credit problem with more debt/credit?

   Hard to believe it really works.

   Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 11, 2008 at 1443 hrs
   
   
   

3. If you don’t like the tube in your nose you can have your “dose” blended in a milkshake.  I recommend chocolate…

   Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 11, 2008 at 1512 hrs
   
   
   

4. What a crappy idea!

   Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 11, 2008 at 1537 hrs
   
   
   

5. That cure had to be started by 2 rednecks.
   1 guy says to the other hey yall watch this

   Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 11, 2008 at 1650 hrs
   
   
   

6. Typically, patients ask a close household member, usually a spouse, to produce a sample of stool, which is tested for disease and infection. In Doriott’s case, her husband, Jerry, 50, a civil engineer, was on tap.

   Appropriate, given that civil engineering can be boiled down to one basic premise: shit flows down hill.

   Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 12, 2008 at 0625 hrs
   
   
   

7. Kinda reminds me of how they apply live leeches & live maggots on occasion for medicinal purposes.

   Posted by Marcus Aurelius on December 13, 2008 at 1429 hrs
   
   
   

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