Fecal matter transplants


#1

I have severe gut dysbiosis after major surgeries and abdominal adhesions. I got approved for FMT off label use (since it’s only approved for C Diff infections). However they want to use a drug that has strangers gut microbiome. In the beginning I thought I was going to be able to choose my donor and have them screened (which would have been my mom.). Apparently they don’t do this anymore. My mom is really pushing me to have it done but I am worried because I have read you can inherit things like depression/anxiety if the donor had it. Does anybody know anything about this or had experience in FMT or a family member that has had it done?


(Joey) #2

Short answers: no, and no. But FWIW, my admittedly limited understanding is that FMT donors are rigorously screened. There are not many who pass muster (no pun).

The idea that a family member is likely to be more effective as a donor in addressing your digestive issue is not an inherently sound assumption. But admittedly, our grasp of which constituent bacteria in an individual’s gut biome achieve which particular results in any other individual has not yet been well established.

Whether FMT would address your particular condition remains another question.

Wishing you the best in making progress in finding a solution for your condition. :vulcan_salute:


#3

thanks for sharing your thoughts


#4

I’ve never heard of picking your own donor, but remember, just like probiotics, FMT is useless if your current diet / supplementation can’t maintain what you transplant, and for a keto’r, if you’re eating near no prebiotic fiber, well… that’s kinda a stopwatch running once the transplant happens. Getting the bugs is great, but starving them to death kinda nullifies the whole thing, actually, not kinda, 100% does.


(B Creighton) #5

You also want to use someone skinny, as there are numerous species associated with skinniness… I didn’t realize FMTs were so hard to get approved. I’ve heard great things about them for autism.

Lacking approval, I will tell you what I did after my last surgery, when I had to use a very powerful antibiotic… Actually, I kinda learned this practice after a rough appendectomy some 40 years ago. I started by pouring a heaping tblsp of ground psyllium seed into a cup of apple juice(I can’t really stomach the stuff plain), and stir it until it gels. Drink all that. The first time I did this, it pulled some really nasty stuff out of my bowels, and I began to sleep so much better. So, I repeated this process whenever I got irregular again. I thought of it just cleaning me out, but now I realize it was doing double duty, as it was supplying a bolus of soluble fiber to feed beneficial bacteria. The next day I would supplement with probiotics. Back then I don’t think there were as many probiotics available as there are now, and now I can also use things like Kimchi, Kombucha, etc, and know about Bacillus subtilis and Vit K2 as well. This last time I was able to return my digestive system to its normal, healthy state much faster than the first time around… but it did take sourcing probiotics from several different sources and fermented foods.


#6

I don’t take probiotic pills. I eat a tablespoon homemade sauerkraut per day. Isn’t the cabbage a prebiotic itself? I actually do eat a little bit of potatoes, mostly the skin…for some reason I like the skin and a small bit of carrots each day and onions and kale. Every now and then I eat asparagus, and I have no idea if it’s a prebiotic but avocado as well. I’m trying to up the sauerkraut but I’ve had gastritis in the past and I also have severe reflux due to damage of my sphincters so I’m very cautious about it.


(Bob M) #7

I just listened to this, which is a researcher in the biome:

It was interesting, though I think he makes the mistake of saying that a burger and accoutrements are high saturated fat.

One of his points was that a carnivore diet can be okay for a biome. He also recommended that if you have troubles with fiber (which I do), start with fermented foods and add them before adding fiber. Now, I eat a lot of fermented foods, but still have trouble with fiber, so I’m not sure he’s 100% correct. For instance, I tried to take Inulin for a while, and this caused me some issues, even at a lowly 5-10 grams per day.

But I have been able to eat more fermented foods over time.

As for fecal transplants, he’s said that this acts to reset the biome from a “bad” biome to a “good” one. But if you get a fecal transplant and have a terrible diet, the transplant probably won’t do much over time.

The problem with probiotic pills is that it’s hard to know if they do anything. Do they actually make it all the way where they need to go? If they do make it all the way where they need to go, do they actually change the biome? So many questions, and with the biome, so few real answers.


#8

Sauerkraut definitely is, and potatoes help as well, but it takes a lot of different things to keep different strains alive and thriving. No different than vitamins and minerals, you’re not going to be optimal without supplementation, maybe 75yrs ago and when intentionally eating a crazy amount of varying stuff, but otherwise, hard as hell to pull it off. Everything’s grown in dead soil, sterilized with UV etc.

Did you have low stomach acid and then treated with PPI’s to lower it even more? That’s common as hell! I fought that for a long time before I got woken up to that one.


(Joey) #9

I suspect part of the challenge is knowing which is which. Getting a biome infusion that isn’t what your own body needs (and is lacking) wouldn’t qualify as a “good” one for that individual at that time.

I imagine that many aspects of FMT remain more of an art than proven science at this stage in our understanding. :man_shrugging:


(Bob M) #10

That’s definitely true. For instance, when they do studies of people who are “obese”, they get different biome results.

When I started keto years ago, a lot of people were taking prebiotics like potato starch and probiotics. The probiotics were varied and included soil-based probiotics. Tons of theories about this, including that soil-based probiotics would kill the “bad” bacteria and encourage growth of “good” bacteria. So, I did the same.

The problem I found was there was no good way to test this. Send your poop to two different labs, get two different results; send poop from two different locations (same time), get two different results. And how do you know what a benefit is?

And then I’ve found over time that lower fiber for me is better. I can’t eat salads that much, for instance. Even inulin, which supposedly has benefits such as higher GLP-1, caused me to have issues.

In that podcast, he was theorizing that a possible use for AI would be to analyze the huge database of biome results we have to see what patterns do or do not occur. I’m not sure that would be a benefit, but at least it would have enough data to look for patterns. Though, as we know, that could be correlation and not causation.


(Joey) #11

I suspect you nailed it… It wouldn’t surprise me at all if our gut biome is heavily influenced by us just as much as we are heavily influenced by it. And round it goes.

The fact that eating probiotics (along with everything else on our plate) influences our gut biome, it would seem obvious that neither we nor our stowaway bacteria are independent variables.

As such, association is perhaps the best that science can achieve in such an open-ended interactive dynamic system.


(John Bradshaw) #12

You can change your intestinal health with simple measures like a cup of Kefir each day. Easy to make your own or get it from the supermarket. Try it for around 8 weeks. If you Google it, it seems to help a lot of people with severe gut problems.

The idea of FMT’s is completely ludicrous to me. Just another way to get money out of hurting people. Natural measures work much better than these crazy ideas like FMT.


(KM) #13

There’s a difference between FMT which attempts to introduce gut bacteria which probably won’t survive because they weren’t there in the first place due to lack of feeding, and reintroducing gut bacteria populations naturally in your gut until they were destroyed by antibiotics or other extreme interventions. Personally if I were in the second category, I would try it. I do think I’d explore what bacteria were likely in my gut based on my diet at the time of the damage. As others have said, no sense inputting bacteria which will starve.


#14

I had pretty extreme doses of antibiotics from the emergency abdominal surgery, and then a couple years later with a severe bout of pneumonia. I suspect most of my gut would have gone back to normal if it weren’t for the adhesions slowing my transit and causing gastroparesis. I would love to eat more sauerkraut if it didn’t give me such a sour stomach. Dairy doesn’t agree with me, fermented or not.


#15

My mom is saying it won’t hurt me, might not help but won’t hurt. She has said repeatedly the FMT enema is really screened and will do no harm.


(Bob M) #16

The problem with the “biome” is that it’s so hard to study. Here are the results of a study where they gave folks 250g of yogurt daily for 42 days. Not great results.

What they fed them:

250g is supposedly a little more than one cup, 8.8 ounces, of yogurt per day. Quite a bit of yogurt.

I eat fermented foods because they tend to agree with me, that is, not cause issues. But I have no idea whether they provide a benefit or not, and it’s also impossible to tell.


(Central Florida Bob ) #17

I’ve almost asked for input on the microbiome at least a dozen times since August. At the start of August, I had a routine/regular colonoscopy. I think that after the procedure I developed a “regular irregularity” of going between a couple of days of normal activity and at least a day of dumping so much it sounded like dumping pitchers full of water. I’d try not to take anything for it, but would take Imodium if the cramping got too bad.

Add to this that I’ve always taken psyllium (Metamucil) so that couldn’t be the difference. Not knowing anything about “the” microbiome (or mine in particular) I tried yogurt and then some “probiotics” from a CVS or something. It was hard to tell if that changed anything, but I kept trying. Something I ran across back in November reminded me of the BRATT diet for diarrhea: Bananas, Rice, Apples, Toast and Tea. The problem for anyone that’s keto is clearly the first four. Simply because I had tried a few pieces, I started to try Bare (brand) dried apples. The label says pretty much 1 gram of carb (total) per gram of apples, I’d measure out a half ounce of apple slices and either crunch them up into yogurt or just eat them. I can handle 14 grams of carbs. At least their ingredients doesn’t list anything besides apples.

Sticking with this has gotten me the closest to normal as I’ve been since last summer.

My take on microbiome as a buzzword for everything is that some day everything we know about the subject will fill books. Right now it’s about the same as reading a one or two page preface to a thousand page book.

Hope this is useful to someone.


#18

I got the rebyota transplant today and I’m really panicking and having serious regrets. I’m experiencing more bloating and discomfort right now and terrified of any long lasting negative mental or physical side effects Angry at myself for being persuaded to do it.


(Laurie) #19

Don’t beat yourself up.

  1. You made a decision to try something because you weren't getting any relief from other therapies.  
    
  2. It potentially may still help you. It will likely take time to get to a new equilibrium.

I know from lots of personal angst that it’s easier said than done to not spend energy on regret or worry. But I’ll still recommend finding something to do or occupy your mind for the next day or two.
I hope that this helps
Good luck


(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #20

Interesting thread. I’m not sure I trust any of the “science” about intestinal bacteria. There are a lot of assumptions about what constitutes “good” and “bad” bacteria, for instance. Some of those assumptions are based on what we here consider to be erroneous dietary advice.

As for adjusting the bacterial population, what we feed survives, and what we don’t feed, dies off. When I joined these forums in 2017, a lot of people with systemic candidiasis were going through Candida spp. die-offs, because they had cut their carbohydrate consumption. It was apparently an unpleasant time, getting through the die-off, but afterward, people felt much better.

I suppose the same is true of instestinal bacteria. If there are species with deleterious effects, or beneficial species that are missing, I suppose a fecal transplant could be helpful for restoring the balance. However, Dr. Benjamin Bikman suggests another method, which is to fast for an extended period, long enough to kill off all the intestinal bacteria. Then, he says, eating a proper human diet (such as we understand that term) will automatically reintroduce species appropriate for such a diet.