Faecal Bacteria Transplant Leads Woman To Gain Severe Weight

Woman suffered a severe and sudden weight gain, after undergoing a faecal bacteria transplant from her overweight daughter.

The stool transplant is a medical procedure, and it is based on transplanting healthy bacteria into a sick gut. Doctors from the United States believe that the transplant might have affected the waist line of the woman. She gained 36 pounds(16 kilograms) in a very short period of time and presently she could be classified as obese, stated reports on the case from Open Forum Infectious Diseases.

A medical expert from the UK stated that the connection between gut bugs and obesity was still unknown. A transplant of faecal microbiota, known also as “transpoosion” could be considered as the extreme adaptation of probiotic yogurts use. The purpose of the transplant is to deliver good bacteria into the gut and the procedure has been officially sustained by the UK health service the previous year.

The procedure is used when persons have stubborn Clostridium difficult infection inside their bowels. The infection could cause symptoms like diarrhoea, and pain in the abdomen, and sometimes it is resistant to antibiotics. The woman of 32 years old, whose name remained unknown, had a severe infection which showed no results to the strongest antibiotics. She had discussed the possibility of a faecal transplant with doctor Colleen Kelly from the Medical School at the Brown University and decided that the donor was going to be her daughter. At that time, her daughter was overweight reaching obese. After the procedure the infection was eliminated. But a year later, the woman returned and claimed gaining a lot of weight and said that she felt something had clicked inside her body. When she started she had a body mass index of 26, a year and a half after the transplant her BMI went up to 33 and three years later it reached 34.5.

Earlier studies, have shown that transplanting gut bacteria from people considered obese to mice, led the animals to gain weight. Doctor Kelly explained that they will change their practices and will make sure that for the future, this type of transplant will not use obese donors.

Doctor Andreas Karatzas, from Reading University, explained that the present evidence showing that gut bacteria affected human weight was unclear. Even if there have been done studies on animals, they have different organisms, and the fact that it applied to mice it doesn’t necessarily mean it would apply to humans as well.

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Christina Langfold

Remember that weird girl in school who never quite managed to fit in? Who was always silent and strange? That was me during my entire teenage life. A few years after finishing college (with a degree in arts) I decided that the best way to become more sociable, while also feeling safe, is to test my people skills online.