Fecal Transplant Can Save Lives

Remember the lady we listened to on the PR radio Dr. Diana had us listen to? The lady was talking about a fecal transplant that actually helped her gut infection! Well, I found a similar article written by Cassandra Willyard about a fecal transplant; it could even possibly be the same lady!

Dena Harris’ mother was diagnosed with a raging gut infection of Clostridium difficile. According to the article Clostridium difficile is a “nasty bacterium that causes watery diarrhea.” Harris’ mother, Ann hart, received a hefty dose of antibiotics, which are the standard treatment, but the antibiotics provided only “temporary relief.” Hart, crying from the pain, according to Harris’, then saw Dr. Colleen Kelly who is a gastroenterologist at Brown University.  Kelly uses an unconventional treatment called a “fecal transplant” that cured similar infections. This treatment involves taking “stool” or also known as feces from a healthy donor, mixed with saline and sends it through a tube into the colon of a patient. “Kelly explains, the treatment provides helpful germs that can restore the balance in the gut, replacing a patient’s sickly microbiome with a healthy one. Ms. Hart had her “transplant” and her daughter was the donor!

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/what-can-brown.jpg

This article was quite interesting, especially when I first heard it on PR radio. If you think about it, it’s just transferring feces from one person to another! But what some people would call a “nasty or disgusting” procedure can actually save lives! The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that Clostridium difficile kills 14,000 people each year in the U.S alone! For this procedure to work and possibly save many lives is outstanding! This article was very short but got right to the details on how this procedure works. The author was great in describing how the process works and what Dr. Kelly does to actually treat patients with Clostridium difficile! The only thing I can point out or that the author could have talked about was if there were any side effects to this procedure? If this procedure can save lives without having any costly side effects, why not use it right?

http://www.latimes.com/health/future/la-he-gut-research-fecal-transplant-20120913,0,2100637.story#axzz2uOjkkx6Y