Doctors report that a woman has dramatically gained weight after a stool transplant from her daughter, reports BBC News. It is a genuine medical procedure to transplant healthy bacteria into a diseased gut, but US doctors think it may have affected her waistline. She quickly gained 36lb (16kg) and is now classed as obese, the case report says.
A faecal microbiota transplant – also referred to by some as a "transpoosion" – is like an extreme version of a probiotic yogurt. The aim is to introduce good bacteria into the gut and it was officially backed by the UK health service last year. It is used when people have stubborn Clostridium difficile infection in their bowels. This can cause vomiting, diarrhoea and abdominal pain and cannot always be treated with antibiotics.
Dr Colleen Kelly, from the Medical School at Brown University said limited conclusions could be drawn from a single patient, but called the case a warning as "there's not a lot on safety evidence out there". Kelly has now changed her practices and "as a result I'm very careful with all our donors don't use obese people".
Dr Andreas Karatzas, from Reading University, said: "You have to bear in mind that this person was saved. If you run the risk of losing a patient, you don't bother about what could happen 20 years later." However, he said the evidence that gut bacteria affected human waistlines was still inconclusive.
[link url="http://www.idsociety.org/FMT_Weight_Gain/"]Full report[/link]
[link url="http://www.bbc.com/news/health-31168511"]Full BBC News report[/link]
[link url="http://ofid.oxfordjournals.org/content/2/1/ofv004.full.pdf+html"]Open Forum Infectious Diseases article[/link]