Poo transplants ‘BETTER than antibiotics’ at treating killer infections, scientists find
POO transplants could help reduce your risk of killer infections better than antibiotics, a study finds.
More than three-quarters of Clostridium difficile (C. diff) patients avoided reinfection after having a faecal transplant, US researchers said.
For comparison, 60 per cent of patients that were given just antibiotics were infected again within eight weeks.
C. diff is a life-threatening bacteria that can result in deadly diarrhoea and colitis.
Dr Aamer Imdad, of Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse, New York, said: “After a person with a C. diff infection gets treated with antibiotics, there is about a 25 percent chance that they will have another episode in the next eight weeks.
“The risk of recurrence increases to about 40 percent with the second episode and to nearly 60 percent with the third episode.
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“So, once you are in this cycle, it gets more and more difficult to break out of it.
“Stool transplants can reverse the dysbiosis and thus decrease the risk of recurrence of the disease.”
There were more than 14,000 cases of C. diff in England in 2021/22.
In the US there are around 250,000 cases a year, resulting in some 12,000 deaths.
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The bacteria lives in the gut of around one in 30 healthy adults and is normally kept under control by other healthy bacteria.
But if the body’s microbiome — your balance of bacteria and other microbes — become unbalanced, C. diff can become an infection.
Antibiotics used to treat C. diff can also cause this, killing off the healthy bacteria and making the body more prone to another infection after a course is completed.
This results in a large number of reinfections once someone has been infected with C. diff — affecting a third of all patients.
Stool transplants involve moving healthy poo from a donor to a patient’s gut, to help rebalance their microbiome.
The latest study, published in the gold standard , looked at all the existing research into how faecal transplants affect patients’ outcomes.
Researchers examined data from six clinical trials, with a total of 320 adults given stool transplants in Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, Canada and the US.
Patients given stool transplants were much less likely to have a reinfection than those given just antibiotics, and were also less likely to die, results showed.
Dr Aamer said: “Stool transplantation probably leads to a larger increase in resolution of repeated infections of C difficile than the other treatments studied.
“Faecal microbiota transplantation may decrease the risk of death in people with recurrent C. diff infections.”
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Prof.essor Maria Vehreschild, of Frankfurt University Hospital in Germany, said: "The effect size of FMT in the secondary prevention of recurrent C. difficile infection is extraordinary.
"An effect this strong is rarely seen with pharmaceuticals."