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Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health

theguardian.com

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Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health

#11

Post by LinuxBender »

iancmceachern wrote: post #9
LinuxBender wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also curious about that as well. How many strains of beneficial bacteria are in feces? The probiotics I use have 20 beneficial strains but the company won't send me a non-capsule pack of the powder. They also have one with 36 strains, 120 billion CFU so it takes a lot of capsules to get a meaningful amount and takes a long time to open all the capsules. Based on my limited research it appears stool has about 100…

My understanding is that a lot of the beneficial organisms dining the presence of oxygen, making it challenging to collect, multiply, and package them into pills or powder. Perhaps this is why they only offer the pills, the powder form in a jar would render some of them ineffective?

I was thinking a sealed Mylar bag with O2 absorbers but I can see the cost issue that may arise especially if only a few self experimenters like me were interested to begin with.

Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health

#12

Post by mumblemumble »

omnicognate wrote: post #4

Is it possible, once scaled up and using an artificial biome as described in the article, that this could be used periodically by people without specific symptoms, as a prophylactic or to improve general health? Or are there reasons that would be a bad idea? Reducing diversity in gut flora, perhaps?

Just shooting from the hip, I'm going to guess that deliberately destabilizing ecosystems that aren't known to be unhealthy is generally not going to make them more healthy.

I wouldn't say that it's impossible to come up with some sort of microbial suppository that can take a healthy (for the host) microbiome and make it even more beneficial to the host. But, given the level of inter-person diversity in gut flora, I can't think of any particular reason to believe that it's likely that there's some universal treatment that would be beneficial to everyone regardless of their existing flora.

Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health

#13

Post by iancmceachern »

LinuxBender wrote: post #11
iancmceachern wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that a lot of the beneficial organisms dining the presence of oxygen, making it challenging to collect, multiply, and package them into pills or powder. Perhaps this is why they only offer the pills, the powder form in a jar would render some of them ineffective?

I was thinking a sealed Mylar bag with O2 absorbers but I can see the cost issue that may arise especially if only a few self experimenters like me were interested to begin with.

As soon as you open the bag it's all exposed to o2. In a blister pack each does is in its own little chamber so when you open one dose it doesn't impact the others.

An interesting aside, they started doing this kind of thing in the last few years for inhalers. There are some medicines that come as a fey powder, and need to be inhaled as such. It's a challenge to keep a bunch of doses together in one container and dose doses out without impacting the rest, so they do the same thing. The inhalers have little blister packs with individual doses in them, each time you need to take a puff you rotate the inhaler which advances to the next dose, pops the blister pack, and then you inhale.

Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health

#15

Post by LinuxBender »

iancmceachern wrote: post #13
LinuxBender wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking a sealed Mylar bag with O2 absorbers but I can see the cost issue that may arise especially if only a few self experimenters like me were interested to begin with.

As soon as you open the bag it's all exposed to o2. In a blister pack each does is in its own little chamber so when you open one dose it doesn't impact the others. An interesting aside, they started doing this kind of thing in the last few years for inhalers. There are some medicines that come as a fey powder, and need to be inhaled as such. It's a challenge to keep a bunch of doses together in one container and dos…

It's probably OK if a percentage of them are damaged by the O2. If I take 4 to 8 trillion each time it just means I would have to do it more often.

The only alternative I know is the usual and incorrect in my opinion way people consume probiotics which is significantly worse. Most are destroyed by the hydrochloride acid, digestive enzymes and bile. Worse, some of them survive and have to pass through the small intestine which is absolutely the wrong place for bacteria to exist, especially if there is even the slightest amount of inflammation of the junctions and especially if some remain in the mucus layer and grow in numbers potentially leading to SIBO.

With my current method they go straight into a container of short chained fatty acids which I understand they can feed off of for a while. The SCFA are also beneficial for the large intestine.

Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health

#16

Post by jjcon »

jeffrallen wrote: post #7

I just saw a documentary on this the other night on Swiss television saying that CHUV in Lausanne is doing this. So maybe "first in the English speaking world that lazy journalists have access to" would be more appropriate.

The regulatory approval is a world first - they are happening all over the world already though

Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health

#17

Post by spfzero »

Wouldn't an easier way to do this be to control diet? For one thing, it slows the process of change down which would ease any shock-related side-effects. Of course, it takes a lot of work from the patient to adhere, but if they are at the point that they are considering fecal transplant, they're probably ready.

This also gives the biome a chance to adapt to anything particular about the individual, if possible (certain pharmaceuticals may not be able to be worked around.)

Also, I would think if you did the transplant and never changed your diet, you'd often just go back to the old biome after a time, but I could be wrong about that.

Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health

#18

Post by throwaway5752 »

omnicognate wrote: post #4

Is it possible, once scaled up and using an artificial biome as described in the article, that this could be used periodically by people without specific symptoms, as a prophylactic or to improve general health? Or are there reasons that would be a bad idea? Reducing diversity in gut flora, perhaps?

I am not totally ignorant of this subject, but I'd be concerned about the unknowns involved in messing around with the very long term coevolution of gut biomes with particular diets, groups of people, and factors we might not know about yet. For one example, I don't believe that that gut viromes, the ecosystem of viruses that infect the gut biome bacteria, are very well understood.

There is real wisdom in "do no harm" as a principle. It would be a lot better for most people to lose weight, eat more fruits and vegetables, spend more time outdoors, and sleep more before they consider a prophylactic fecal transplant.

Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health

#19

Post by massaman_yams »

spfzero wrote: post #17

Wouldn't an easier way to do this be to control diet? For one thing, it slows the process of change down which would ease any shock-related side-effects. Of course, it takes a lot of work from the patient to adhere, but if they are at the point that they are considering fecal transplant, they're probably ready. This also gives the biome a chance to adapt to anything particular about the individual, if possible (certa…

Diet alone can't restore strains that don't exist in a patient's microbiome.

Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health

#20

Post by dirtyid »

I can't wait for celebrities to start selling their poop.

On serious note, mostly have followed this over years from weight loss literature, wonder if it will be applied in reverse, find the most efficient gut flora and get transplantees to hold on to calorise more efficiently.

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