Doctors can now conduct fecal transplants orally. Hooray?

Clostridium difficile colitis, a type of infectious diarrhea, is so painful and unbearable that people who are infected often need to go to hospital in order treat it. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that somewhere around 14,000 Americans die of causes linked to the infection every year.

Standard treatment involves antibiotics, but there are various strains of the virus that are now resistant to such antibiotic treatments. In cases such as these, a new treatment known as fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) has become popular in recent years. The treatment, however, is rather unpleasant.

Current FMTs require health workers to stick a tube into your nose or rectum so that a doctor can pump in liquid fecal matter. Unpleasant is an understatement, but a team of doctors at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, led by Elizabeth Hohmann in the Infectious Diseases Division, have made a pill version of the FMT treatment. Essentially, it’s a poop ill.

Doctors gather a donor’s fecal matter and combine it with saline “using a commercial blender,” wrote the researchers in their study. Once the fecal matter is properly processed, it’s put into a capsule and given to the patients. Initial studies shows that 90% of the patients who received the pill were cured, making it just as effective of previous methods.

“These results may help make FMT accessible to a wider population of patients, in addition to potentially making the procedure safer,” the authors of the study wrote in a statement. They published their results in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Saturday.

“The use of capsules obviates the need for invasive procedures for administration, further increasing the safety of FMT by avoiding procedure-associated complications and significantly reducing cost,” the doctors added.

Read more about the story at The Washington Post.

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