Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health
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Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health
#2Out of curiosity, how does this compare to mixing diverse cultures of probiotics with short chained fatty acids and injecting them rectally?
Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health
#3Out of curiosity, how does this compare to mixing diverse cultures of probiotics with short chained fatty acids and injecting them rectally?
Not a doctor, but I suppose its because its a complete mix and easier to do, because theres almost no prep needed?
Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health
#4Is 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?
Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health
#5Out of curiosity, how does this compare to mixing diverse cultures of probiotics with short chained fatty acids and injecting them rectally?
Probiotics mix would be orders of magnitude less diverse.
Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health
#6Out of curiosity, how does this compare to mixing diverse cultures of probiotics with short chained fatty acids and injecting them rectally?
Probiotics mix would be orders of magnitude less diverse.
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 billion per gram of wet stool but it also contains a lot of other material some of which may be harmful.
Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health
#7I 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.
Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health
#8Is 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?
Our understanding of the gut microbiome is really primitive, we really don't know what a great one looks like. More problematic is that quite a lot of the bacteria that are critical die in the presence of oxygen and are thus very hard to collect and reintroduce. So far no one has made a mechanism to keep them alive and reintroduce them into other people. I would not be quick to rush to a fake biome just yet, it will almost certainly be lacking in a whole range of areas.
Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probiotics mix would be orders of magnitude less diverse.
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?
Re: Australia gives world-first approval for fecal transplants to restore gut health
#10I 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.
> first in the English speaking world
I don’t know what regulatory regime CHUV is working under but the regulatory approval by Australia as a generally acceptable medical practice in the country is substantially different to the limited research scale programs employed elsewhere in the world.