A woman who performed fecal transplants using her husband’s feces cured her ulcerative colitis (UC).
Saffron Cassaday, 36, had lived for 15 years with a type of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), an autoimmune condition in which the immune system attacks the colon, causing painful inflammation and ulcers in the digestive tract.
One of the characteristic – and most distressing – symptoms is the sudden and urgent need to defecate.
Ms Cassaday said: ‘I had what I call ‘trigger situations’ where traffic jams would cause me to panic because I thought I wouldn’t be able to get to the toilet in time.’
Mrs. Cassaday began collecting her husband’s stool and mixing it with water or saline solution. She then placed the mixture in an enema bottle to administer to herself through her rectum. She documented the process in her new film, Designer S***
She had been living with a type of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) for 15 years, an autoimmune condition in which the immune system attacks the colon and causes painful inflammation and ulcers in the digestive tract.
At the airport, the security lines and seat belt sign that lit up while flying “would send me into a spiral,” and she experienced “shame and embarrassment” about her condition.
“It made me afraid to leave my house sometimes,” she said Yahoo life.
Mrs. Cassady was taking medications for her condition, but these became less effective and no longer controlled her symptoms well.
Then she read an article about a man with Crohn’s disease whose mother treated him with her own feces in a “do-it-yourself” style of an at-home fecal transplant.
Crohn’s disease is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that affects the lining of the digestive tract, while UC causes inflammation of the colon and rectum.
The medical term for transferring feces from one person to another is fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT). This involves transferring medically screened stool from a healthy person to a patient’s gastrointestinal tract using an enema to rebalance bacteria in the stomach.
An enema is an injection of fluid into the lower intestine through the rectum.
The purpose of this procedure is to take the healthy microbiota from a screened donor and give it to someone who does not have a balanced microbiome to try to restore the health of that person’s microbiota – the trillions of bacteria, microorganisms and fungi that live in the digestive tract. channel.
A balanced microbiota contributes to a person’s overall health and if the microbes are out of whack, it can be detrimental to health.
Good bacteria are extracted from a healthy donor and processed into pills or a liquid. It is then administered to patients using an enema, a liquid administered through the rectum
Ms Cassaday said: ‘From then on I started doing my own research and realized that there were clinical trials underway for faecal transplantation to treat IBD and a lot of other conditions. And these clinical trials showed promising results.”
IBD is a term for both conditions: Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
However, she could not access the treatment because it is not approved by the FDA to treat UC or Crohn’s disease.
She added: ‘I couldn’t get a doctor to help me. But I thought if I could just find a way to do this, there was a 30 percent chance it could help me.”
Mrs. Cassaday went against doctors’ recommendations and used stool from her healthy husband, Al Mukadam.
She began collecting her husband’s stool and mixing it with water or saline. She then placed the mixture in an enema bottle to administer to herself through her rectum.
She documented the process in her new film, Designer S***.
Ms Cassaday said: ‘Even when I watch the film now I get so angry and I can’t believe I did it.
“It’s a matter of desperation that pushed me to do it, to ignore how gross it was and just get it done.”
After more than 100 fecal transfers between her and her husband over two years, Mrs. Cassaday reports that she is symptom-free.
She also became pregnant, which put autoimmune diseases into remission by producing more white blood cells called T cells to protect the baby.
“I feel great,” she said.
‘It’s been about three and a half years since I had any symptoms at all. And my colonoscopies show complete histological remission. I really feel like I have my life back.’
Histological remission is the complete healing of the colon, without any evidence of inflammation.
FMT is most commonly used to treat recurrent C. difficile infection – inflammation of the colon spread by bacterial spores found in stool. This is the only FDA-approved treatment for FMT in the US. It is 90 percent effective.
The protocol has been approved for various treatments in different countries and can also be used for gastrointestinal conditions such as colitis, irritable bowel syndrome and constipation – but success rates are much lower.
Recent studies have delved into the benefits of treating conditions linked to a poor balance between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bacteria in the gut, such as autism.
FMT can replenish bacterial balance because it acts as a probiotic, with stool samples often containing as many as 1,000 different species of bacteria.
The transplant is carried out through tubes – inserted into the recipient’s nostril, down the throat and into the stomach – or directly into the large intestine.
The fecal sample can also be transplanted via enemas or pills containing freeze-dried material that is taken by mouth or inserted into the rectum.
There have been reports of patients experiencing unexpected weight gain, bouts of vomiting and even abdominal pain after treatment.
However, the long-term safety and effectiveness of FMT are relatively unknown, and researchers have called for more research to determine the risks.
FMT is approved in other parts of the world, including Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. It is only approved for C. difficile infection in the US.