Gerrard Kaonga
While it's shocking enough that ‘poo transplants’ are a thing, one woman’s experience with it is certainly eyebrow raising.
Talking about your gut health is pretty fashionable right now, and more and more people are taking steps to improve their overall health. But one college student hoped a rather experimental treatment would help her with the health issues she was suffering with.
Danielle Koepke suffered with IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) symptoms including indigestion, stabbing pains from trapped gas, and severe constipation - and the doctors’ advice and treatments weren’t helping much.
Koepke tried to get help from doctors for five years and when nothing seemed to work, she opted for a rather experimental treatment. If I was told this was an option, I really would just assume it was a joke.
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The treatment is called a fecal microbiota transplant (FMT), where a healthy donor's feces is introduced into a patient's gut to re-populate it with 'good' microbes.
Featuring in the Netflix documentary Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut., Koepke said she opted to use her boyfriend and her brother’s as donors.
Would you feel more or less comfortable with the donors being someone you knew?
Currently, FMTs are only approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for C diff. bacterial infections. However, scientists are conducting research to see whether they can be useful for other treatments.
An FMT starts with blending a healthy donor's feces with saline solution and inserting it into the recipient's gastrointestinal tract, either through an enema, oral capsules, colonoscopy, or upper endoscopy. Even now, I still assume this treatment is a joke, but then again, I am no scientists.
After using her brother as a donor, Koepke reported that her symptoms got better, amazingly she started developing acne like her brother, who had a history of hormonal acne.
When she used her boyfriends, who had no physical health problems, her acne did go away but she began to experience depression symptoms, just as her partner often dealt with.
So not exactly the greatest of tradeoffs.
Microbial ecologist at UC San Diego Jack Gilbert, who spoke to Business Insider about the case, attempted to explain what exactly was going on.
He said It is possible that the bacteria in the stool can influence inflammation in the recipient's body, by affecting their metabolism and activating their immune response. This would in term shift their hormonal activity which could promote the bacteria that can cause acne on the skin.
Gilbert also noted that, according to his research, people suffering from depression may be missing certain bacteria from their gut.
He said: "She may have had the 'anti-depressant' bacteria in her gut, but when she swapped her microbiome with his, her anti-depressant bacteria got wiped out.”