While it may have sounded absurd at first, doctors are increasingly taking a serious look at using feces to treat everything from diseases of the digestive tract to obesity.
In a new clinical trial, scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital will be using pills of freeze-dried fecal material to determine “the impact of gut bacteria on weight”.
The concept behind administering feces as medicine is that a person’s ailment or health issue is being supported by an unhealthy balance of the gut’s symbiotic bacteria. The technique has been used to successfully treat a deadly hospital superbug, Clostridium difficule.
In the new MGH trial, volunteers will get weekly fecal pills for six weeks, and their weight and health will be taken at three, six, and twelve months from the start of the study. The volunteers will continue with their regular consumption and health habits throughout the study.
“The pills are odorless, tasteless and double-encapsulated to ensure they will not release until they reach the right location in the large intestine,” study leader Dr. Elaine Yu, a clinical research at MGH, told the New York Daily News.
Yu said volunteers won’t be capable of telling if they’re ingesting fecal pills or the placebos because they are being so cautiously created and tightly controlled with the Food and Drug Administration. The Massachusetts researcher admitted to Ars Technica, “We have no idea what the result will be.”
The new trial builds on a study from several years ago, where scientists extracted the gut microbes from a pair of twins—one thin, one obese—and transplanted them into two sets of microbe-free mice. Despite the fact that all the mice were on the same diet, the rodents that acquired the obese twin’s microbes became fat. The mice that received the lean twin’s mix remained slim, indicating the microbes were indeed playing a role in the mice’s weight.
Furthermore, a woman recently received a fecal matter transplant (FMT) to help remedy a chronic infection from Clostridium difficile. The donor was the woman’s daughter, who was overweight. After the operation, the woman was relieved of her infection, but strangely gained weight.
Yu said she hopes microbe treatments become part of a suite of interventions for obesity and metabolic disorders.
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Feature Image: tacit requiem/Flickr
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