Woman shares experience with faecal transplant for Crohn’s disease
Poo transplants can alleviate painful symptoms for people with gut problems – this is how they work.
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Poo transplants are being used to help people battling painful gut conditions that are on the rise in Australia, with the treatment being tested for a range of illnesses including long Covid.
Nicole Afford battled crippling symptoms of Crohn’s disease for decades, with the condition eventually forcing her to quit her job.
But after a faecal microbiota transplant (FMT) last year her health vastly improved.
The stool of a healthy person was put inside her via a colonoscopy to improve her microbiome with beneficial bacteria.
The 54-year-old grandmother said she paid $8000 for the donated stool and her private health insurance covered the procedure.
She suffered debilitating symptoms including pain, nausea and diarrhoea since she was a teenager.
In the past Ms Afford was hospitalised haemorrhaging blood and lining of her bowel and suffered pain so severe she would pass out.
By the time she had to give up her role at a university in 2022, her health had seriously declined and she was constantly thinking about how foods may trigger her or where the nearest toilet would be.
“I was pretty desperate,” Ms Afford, who lives near Ballarat, said.
“Post-transplant, the biggest thing I can say is I’ve got so much free space in my head.”
Ms Afford said she experienced discomfort a couple of times a week now, compared to severe pain daily previously, and could now eat “pretty much anything”.
“Some people go, ‘Ew, how could you stand the thought of somebody else’s poo going in there,’ … (but) you can’t even think of it like that,” Ms Afford said.
“If I do become unwell again, I can have another faecal transplant.”
She said she was “so grateful” the transplant has worked for her, as they were not effective for everybody.
She said she hoped the FMT samples could attract funding to make them more accessible.
Ms Afford’s doctor, gastroenterologist Jon Watson from Bellarine Gut Health in Geelong, said FMT was a “relatively new concept”.
FMT for Clostridioides difficile infection, which Prof Watson said caused severe bowel inflammation in people who’d taken multiple courses of antibiotics, is a well established treatment.
Antibiotics can disrupt the gut microbiome’s balance by killing off good bacteria.
Prof Watson performs transplants on patients with ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease, and tracks the procedure’s impact for research.
Prof Watson emphasised FMT wasn’t effective in all patients — he said in ulcerative colitis patients research suggested 25 to 50 per cent responded, and the response rate was lower for Crohn’s disease.
“Even though all of the donors are tested for infection and other characteristics, we always warn our patients that a bit like having a blood transfusion, there is always a theoretical risk of infection transmission,” he said.
He sources faeces from a centre in Adelaide, where healthy people donate their stool.
FMT products cannot be supplied directly to the public.
Oxygen was extracted from samples so good bacteria could survive, Prof Watson said.
It is transported in homogenised liquid form in a syringe on dry ice and immediately put in a freezer when it arrives in Geelong.
Prof Watson said four hours before the transplant it was taken out of the freezer and allowed to gradually warm up to room temperature.
Research around the world is looking at the procedure for other conditions, with Deakin University in Victoria set to recruit people for a trial looking at whether they can help long Covid patients.
A Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) spokeswoman said the approved clinical indication for FMT was the treatment of Clostridioides difficile infection.
“TGA approved FMT products must only be provided for use under the supervision or on the advice of a specialist gastroenterologist or infectious disease clinician,” she said.
For conditions other than Clostridioides difficile infection, FMT products can be released for a registered clinical trial, via the Special Access Scheme or via the Authorised Prescriber Scheme.
Editorial note: This article is for general interest and informational purposes only. It does not constitute medical advice
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Originally published as Woman shares experience with faecal transplant for Crohn’s disease
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