Frozen capsules of poop may help patients with C. difficile gut infections

People receiving antibiotic medications in health care settings are often at a higher risk of contracting infections, with the most common ones being from the bacterium Clostridium difficile, a potentially life-threatening bacteria. Now, in a preliminary study, researchers have successfully cured patients of recurrent C. difficile infections (CDIs) by treating them orally with frozen fecal matter contained in capsules. Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the study found that the treatment stopped incidences of diarrhea 90 percent of the time, Medical Daily reported.

While a majority of us carry C.difficile bacteria in our guts, people taking antibiotics are still vulnerable to a CDI. That’s because in normal guts, populations of other bacteria keep C.difficile in check. However, once antibiotics destroy these other bacteria, C. difficile proliferates, unchecked. Because of this, CDIs kill 14,000 adult and pediatric patients each year in the U.S. In most cases, the cause of death is severe diarrhea or acute inflammation of the bowel.

If the spores C. difficile releases are able to exit an infected person's guts, and travel through the air to another person, the cycle can start again. Treating these infections becomes more difficult when the bacteria have become resistant to certain antibiotics, such as metronidazole or vancomycin.

Researchers have found that fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), or stool transplants, could be efffective in managing or curing CDI. It involves introducing fecal bacteria from a healthy individual to the gut of a sick patient. Certain issues, however, such as methods to introduce the bacteria and the long-term impact of the treatment, have led to difficulty getting the treatment implemented.

To get around this problem, doctors started using frozen fecal matter from healthy donors, and transplanted them into patients via a nasogastric tube. This technique was found to be just as effective as a fresh stool transplant. The doctors then took this innovation further and placed the fecal bacteria into a capsule that would be consumed orally, thus eliminating the need for gastrointestinal procedures.

The researchers used these frozen capsules on 20 patients with recurrent CDI. Each patient took 15 capsules on two consecutive days, and were then tracked for six months. Fourteen of the 20 patients (70 percent) had clinical resolution of diarrhea after the first administration of capsules, and remained symptom-free at eight weeks. All six non-responders were treated again at about seven days after the first procedure. Four of them obtained responded to the treatment, which meant the capsules were 90 percent effective.

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