From news-miner.com:
After several straight months of persistent diarrhea, a New York woman was exhausted, uncomfortable, and frustrated. She also was out thousands of dollars that she’d spent on drugs and hospital bills. The problem had begun while she was being treated with intravenous antibiotics for an infection that caused inflammation in her colon. In healthy people, pathogens like the Clostridium difficile bacteria responsible for the woman’s diarrhea are held in check by harmless intestinal microorganisms, poetically referred to as flora. By killing off these benign bugs, antibiotics often upset the balance of the gut ecosystem and leave it open to novel invaders or nasty, normally latent microbes.
Dorothy Ogden (not her real name) learned the hard way that antibiotic-associated diarrhea can persist in some people long after they’ve beaten their original infection and stopped taking antibiotics. No treatment for the diarrhea gave Ogden more than temporary respite, she says, until she agreed to undergo an unorthodox procedure at Montefiore Medical Center in New York.
Lawrence J. Brandt, a gastroenterologist at Montefiore, reseeded Ogden’s colon with some of her husband’s fecal matter—replete with a normal array of thriving microorganisms. By replacing the flora that Ogden had lost to antibiotics, Brandt revived the natural microbial competition.
Using good bacteria to obstruct bad ones—a strategy known as bacterial interference—is one application of so-called probiotics, a field with growing medical promise. The name suggests a twist on antibiotics, which kill disease-causing microbes. Some probiotic bacteria do their work by competing for resources and space with pathogens inside the body and, in effect, elbowing the bad bugs out of the way.
Others secrete byproducts that are toxic to a disease-causing microbe but harmless to people, trigger the host’s immune system to gird itself for battle against hostile bacteria, promote other responses in the host that stymie pathogens, or use several mechanisms at once, says Gregor Reid, a microbiologist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario.
Many folks, however, find the idea of receiving bacterial transfusions to prevent or treat illness rather hard to take, especially when it requires a distasteful treatment. “A lot of people don’t like this procedure and won’t do it,” Ogden, now 72, recalls Brandt telling her before he described the fecal colonoscopy that he was recommending. Brandt mixed samples of the husband’s stool in saline solution and deposited globules of it every 10 centimeters along her colon. The application extended from Ogden’s anus to her cecum, about 150 centimeters away, which is as far into the intestinal tract as a colonoscope can reach.
The infusion seemed to restore the proper bacterial balance, and Ogden’s symptoms disappeared immediately, Brandt reported in November 2000. It was the first time that Brandt—or anyone, as far as he knows—had attempted the procedure, although simpler fecal enemas had worked in several dozen earlier cases.
After several straight months of persistent diarrhea, a New York woman was exhausted, uncomfortable, and frustrated. She also was out thousands of dollars that she’d spent on drugs and hospital bills. The problem had begun while she was being treated with intravenous antibiotics for an infection that caused inflammation in her colon. In healthy people, pathogens like the Clostridium difficile bacteria responsible for the woman’s diarrhea are held in check by harmless intestinal microorganisms, poetically referred to as flora. By killing off these benign bugs, antibiotics often upset the balance of the gut ecosystem and leave it open to novel invaders or nasty, normally latent microbes.
Dorothy Ogden (not her real name) learned the hard way that antibiotic-associated diarrhea can persist in some people long after they’ve beaten their original infection and stopped taking antibiotics. No treatment for the diarrhea gave Ogden more than temporary respite, she says, until she agreed to undergo an unorthodox procedure at Montefiore Medical Center in New York.
Lawrence J. Brandt, a gastroenterologist at Montefiore, reseeded Ogden’s colon with some of her husband’s fecal matter—replete with a normal array of thriving microorganisms. By replacing the flora that Ogden had lost to antibiotics, Brandt revived the natural microbial competition.
Using good bacteria to obstruct bad ones—a strategy known as bacterial interference—is one application of so-called probiotics, a field with growing medical promise. The name suggests a twist on antibiotics, which kill disease-causing microbes. Some probiotic bacteria do their work by competing for resources and space with pathogens inside the body and, in effect, elbowing the bad bugs out of the way.
Others secrete byproducts that are toxic to a disease-causing microbe but harmless to people, trigger the host’s immune system to gird itself for battle against hostile bacteria, promote other responses in the host that stymie pathogens, or use several mechanisms at once, says Gregor Reid, a microbiologist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario.
Many folks, however, find the idea of receiving bacterial transfusions to prevent or treat illness rather hard to take, especially when it requires a distasteful treatment. “A lot of people don’t like this procedure and won’t do it,” Ogden, now 72, recalls Brandt telling her before he described the fecal colonoscopy that he was recommending. Brandt mixed samples of the husband’s stool in saline solution and deposited globules of it every 10 centimeters along her colon. The application extended from Ogden’s anus to her cecum, about 150 centimeters away, which is as far into the intestinal tract as a colonoscope can reach.
The infusion seemed to restore the proper bacterial balance, and Ogden’s symptoms disappeared immediately, Brandt reported in November 2000. It was the first time that Brandt—or anyone, as far as he knows—had attempted the procedure, although simpler fecal enemas had worked in several dozen earlier cases.