14 DAY TRIAL // A so-called poop pill could soon be used to treat recurrent gut infection caused by a bacterium known to the scientific community as Clostridium difficile (C. difficile, for short).
Researchers say that said bacterium affects about 500,000 people in the United States alone on a yearly basis. What's more, it is responsible for some 14,000 annual deaths in said country.
People infected with C. difficile display symptoms such as diarrhea and fever, Nature tells us.
For the time being, cases of recurrent gut infection with this bacterium are treated with fecal transplants. Specifically, patients are administered donor feces containing healthy microbes either through enemas or through colonoscopies.
In some cases, the feces are delivered via tubes that are inserted in the nose and that reach all the way into the patient's gut.
However, these methods are fairly invasive, which is why researchers are trying to find new ways of treating C. difficile gut infections.
According to Thomas Louie, an infectious-disease specialist with the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, pills containing microbes derived from human feces could be an effective treatment option.
The researcher claims to have already used such pills to treat 31 patients, 30 of which were cured.
The patients treated in this fairly innovative manner were each asked to take between 24 – 34 pills containing healthy microbes. After being administered this treatment, the patients were closely monitored throughout the course of an entire year.
During this time, the 30 people declared cured lost all traces of C. difficile in their gut. What's more, researcher Thomas Louie says that, as tests showed, their healthy gut microbe population increased to a considerable extent.
Thomas Louie and his colleagues wish to further investigate the possibility to use pills containing human feces microbes to treat C. difficile infections and hope that, at some point in the future, such pills will start being commercialized.