Stool is a remedy for colitis?

Recently, a little funny article was published at JAMA, an extremely famous medical journal, saying human stool can cure infectious disease in colon.

JAMA: Oral, Capsulized, Frozen Fecal Microbiota Transplantation for Relapsing Clostridium difficile Infection

According to this article, transplantation of fecal microbiota is not a new method as a treatment strategy for Clostridium difficile (Cd) infection. Cd is a kind of bacteria which can grow in colon when normal intestinal flora is destroyed by antibiotic medicines. Cd causes inflammation on the intestinal membrane, leading to diarrhea, potentially fatal. Thus, Cd infection can be a awful foe for the patients taking medical treatment.

Growth of Cd is grounded on imbalance of enteric bacteria. This fact lets us easily imagine that transportation of internal bacteria could be a solution against Cd infection. The matter is the concrete way to do so. I am not familiar to this field, so I cannot estimate the difficulty of replication of the flora. Anyway, the experts have chosen to utilize raw stool of human.

Besides psychological resistance needless to say, there were some obstacles to take it into practice. The stool has to be fresh, not contaminated. In the hygiene point of view, extracted stool should be prescribed to the patients as soon as possible. It means that donors have to be prepared regularly, keeping the complete health status.

The research team resolved these barriers with using frozen stool. An open clinical trial has proven that efficacy and safety with this therapy were met in the patients with Cd induced diarrhea.

This study is quite preliminary. Randomized controlled trials are required to certify the outcome. If applied, this procedure may realize mass production of the remedy. Nonetheless, perhaps psychological resistance will be still a great wall.