He is his own fecal therapist
What biohacking has brought us to: transplanting bacteria at home
When medicine is not developing fast enough, some take health management into their own hands and decide to experiment
We chose a difficult topic: intestinal bacteria transplantation. We are going to continue to write about what can benefit health, and also about advanced research in the field of biotechnology. Now we will help you figure out what kind of bacteria live in the intestine, how they can help or harm a person and why they should be transplanted.
So, Sergey Fage took up biohacking and spent $ 200 thousand on tests and consultations in pursuit of health, productivity and happiness. Other experimenters are using treatments that have not yet been approved by clinical trials. Today we will talk about some of them – about those who decided to transplant intestinal bacteria to get rid of pain and inflammation.
What do bacteria do in the gut
There are hundreds of trillions of bacteria living in the human body. This bacterial community is called the microbiota. The vital activity of bacteria living in the intestine is so closely related to the body that scientists call the intestinal microbiota a separate organ. The intestinal microbiota helps digest food, synthesizes vitamins, and participates in the work of the immune system.
The composition of the bacterial community depends on what a person eats. Each of us eats in his own way and thus forms his own unique microbiota profile. At the same time, the usual categories of "good" or "bad" do not apply to intestinal bacteria. It is necessary to assess the balance of the system as a whole and the representation of individual bacterial species in relation to each other.
New – well-forgotten old
Food enters the body and is processed by the gastrointestinal tract. The waste from this process consists of undigested food residues, water and a large number of bacteria. Animals can eat poop if the body lacks trace elements, when it is necessary for better digestion, or if a young animal needs a source of beneficial microflora.
As a result of evolution, humans have no reason to eat feces: although there are nutrients in them, our body cannot digest them, and the concentration of non–nutritious, but potentially dangerous bacteria in feces is about a trillion per gram. The smell of feces seems unpleasant to us: this is how nature arranged it to protect us from potential infection with infections, for example, cholera, typhoid fever, E. coli.
Scientists began to study in detail the composition of feces and its properties only in the XIX century. Until then, doctors, despite their disgust, used feces for medical purposes.
The ancient Egyptian Ebers papyrus, dating from 1500 BC, contains more than fifty recipes for medicines using feces.
In the IV century, a suspension with faeces was used in China to help patients with food poisoning or severe diarrhea.
Why transplant bacteria
Bacterial research led to the invention of antibiotics in the twentieth century. But these weapons in the fight against bacterial diseases, for example, tuberculosis and pneumonia, have their own side effects. Together with the pathogenic microflora, antibiotics destroy useful ones, weaken the immune system and open up the possibility of new diseases. In addition, over time, many bacteria develop protection and become resistant to antibiotics. Such bacteria seriously threaten human health, but other means should be sought to combat them.
In 1958, American surgeon Ben Eisman prescribed enemas to four patients with pseudomembranous colitis. Eisman suggested that antibiotic treatment destroyed the bacterial environment of the intestine. And for enemas, I used water with the addition of feces from healthy patients to populate intestinal bacteria, restore the microflora damaged by antibiotics. It worked.
The method did not gain much popularity: over the next three decades, only a few similar attempts were carried out. But in the 1980s, intestinal bacterial transplantation began to be used to treat diseases caused by Clostridium difficile bacteria.
By 2011, the number of deaths from diseases caused by Clostridium difficile bacteria in the United States reached 15,000 people per year
The more actively antibiotics were used, the more cases of diseases from Clostridium difficile were. The method of transplanting intestinal bacteria, known in ancient Egypt and China, has again become in demand.
Today, scientists tend to believe that the health of the microflora is not in getting rid of pathogenic bacteria, but in the balance of the composition of the bacterial community.
If some kind of bacteria is missing in the intestinal microflora, it is not easy to replenish them. If you deliver the right bacteria to the body with food, they will be killed by too aggressive environment in the stomach. The body does not know how to synthesize bacteria, and not all species can be grown in the laboratory. Therefore, microbiota transplantation becomes an interesting alternative.
How it works
No, no one will put enemas with poop. To introduce bacteria into the body, a bacterial suspension or tablets are used.
For transplantation, samples of the bacterial mass of healthy people who eat right and were able to preserve a high diversity of microbiota bacteria are taken. The purified bacterial mass prepared for transplantation does not contain mucus, food residues or intestinal epithelium. It is administered with an enema. Pills with bacterial mass are used more often.
The waste of the human body acquires the status of a medicine only under the supervision of a doctor. Microbiota transplantation is legally regulated in different ways in different countries: in the USA, you need to apply for clinical trials and perform microbiota transplantation exclusively for patients diagnosed with pseudomembranous colitis, in Canada, the procedure can only be performed as part of clinical trials, and China, Australia, the European Union have not yet decided whether to call microbiota transplantation a medicine or No. Legislative difficulties and limitations are connected, among other things, with the fact that scientists have not yet fully studied the mechanism of the therapeutic effect of bacterial transplantation and its long-term consequences.
What is known about the results of transplantation
Biophysicist Joshua Zainer performed a microbiota transplant procedure himself, without waiting for official permission or even the necessary diagnosis. He suffered from intestinal pains and, having not received effective treatment from traditional medicine, decided to put an experiment on himself. Joshua found a volunteer who agreed to provide samples. Then Zainer drank a two-day course of antibiotics to suppress the vital activity of the microbiota from the inside and then carefully wiped the body with a wet sponge with tetracycline powder to cleanse the body of bacteria from the outside. I applied samples of the donor microbiota to the skin, took pills with fecal contents.
Three days after the procedure, Zainer sent samples of his updated microbiota to the laboratory for analysis. It turned out that the bacterial composition of the samples is more similar to the microbiota of the volunteer than to the microbiota of the Zainer himself.
There is another case. An anonymous author on Reddit talks about his struggle with irritable bowel syndrome. Over the years, neither diets nor a course of magnesium have helped. Then a home procedure for transplanting intestinal microbiota, the result after ten days is a condition that has not been there for ten years. The author says that now he calmly eats onions, garlic, adds spices to his food, which his body could not tolerate.
It is easy to question these results: the procedure itself was not carried out in a laboratory, without control groups, a significant sample of participants and study protocols. There is a result – an improvement in the quality of life of experimenters, but such isolated cases are not enough to consider all such procedures effective and safe.
While the sufferers are trying to be treated on their own, scientists are investigating possible side effects. At the Mayo Clinic (USA), patients suffering from infection caused by the bacterium Clostridium difficile underwent fecal microbiota transplantation and 90% of them were cured.
Majdi Osman, therapist, head of the clinical program of the non-profit organization OpenBiome:
"In some cases, patients got better within a few hours after the procedure."
In Russia, the Center for New Medical Technologies of the IHBFM SB RAS conducts treatment with filtrates of microorganisms. Colonoscopy is used for transplantation: 250-500 ml of microbiota filtrate is injected into the intestine. The sustained effect of the procedure is noted in 80%-97% of cases of treatment.
The medical future of microbiota transplantation
According to According to the National Institute of Diabetes, Diseases of the Digestive System and Kidneys of the USA, 60 to 70 million people a year suffer from diseases of the gastrointestinal tract in the United States alone. Among these diseases are chronic constipation, irritable bowel syndrome – not fatal, but painful and difficult to treat. Microbiota transplantation can become an effective and inexpensive medicine for them, which acts quickly and significantly improves the quality of life.
Microbiota transplantation can be used as a therapeutic agent for radiation poisoning, to improve the prognosis of tumor patients after radiation therapy. Regular (once every three months) procedures for transplanting fecal bacteria help with Crohn's disease.
In order for the microbiome transplantation method to take its place in the methodology of treatment of gastrointestinal diseases, more long-term studies should be conducted and banks of donor fecal samples should be created.
Maybe someday it will be possible to establish the production of intestinal bacterial strains that can help in the diagnosis or treatment of a variety of diseases.
While scientists are conducting clinical studies, we recommend that those who are not inclined to extreme biohacking maintain the balance of the intestinal bacteria community.
To do this, choose a variety of products. It is better to give preference to vegetables, legumes, whole grains. These products consist of fiber, digesting which bacteria secrete useful substances that protect the intestines from inflammation. Do not abuse antibiotics, take them as prescribed by a doctor when it is really necessary, and always complete the course of treatment.
(For detailed references to sources, see the original article – VM.)
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