- Daniell Koepke turned to homemade poop transplants to relieve debilitating intestinal symptoms.
- She used her brother and her boyfriend as donors and her symptoms improved.
- But she also had acne like her brother and depression like her boyfriend.
As a student, Daniell Koepke began experiencing symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, including indigestion, shooting pains from trapped gas, and severe constipation.
When nothing seemed to help after five years of doctor visits, Koepke decided to try an experimental treatment called fecal microbiota transplant (or DIY poop), where feces from a healthy donor are introduced into the intestine of a patient to repopulate it with “good” microbes. She used her brother and her boyfriend as donors, she said in the Netflix documentary “Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut.”
FMTs are only approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration for C diff. bacterial infections, but scientists are studying them as a potential treatment for many conditions, including depression, as growing research suggests there is a link between gut health and mental and physical health problems.
Although some of Koepke’s symptoms improved, she said she also began experiencing acne like her brother, and then depression like her boyfriend.
A similar experience was documented in the 2023 documentary “Designer $hit.” A man in his 30s with Crohn’s disease has been doing DIY poop transplants using his mother as a donor for years. They seemed to relieve his bowel symptoms, but he experienced menopausal symptoms such as sweating, hot flashes and mood swings, similar to those of his postmenopausal mother.
Thomas Borody, director of the Center for Digestive Diseases in Sydney, Australia, who pioneered FMT treatments in the 1980s, told “Designer $hit” that it was possible the man absorbed hormones from his feces. , but this link has not been proven.
Removing food from his diet made the situation worse
Koepke’s gut symptoms, which she said were the result of a diet high in refined sugar and low in fiber, didn’t fit neatly into one box. Doctors didn’t know what to do, so they prescribed antibiotics “like candy,” she said.
Over the past five years, she has taken six courses of antibiotics per year. But they didn’t help. Studies have shown that antibiotics can kill good bacteria in the gut.
As she became sicker, Koepke cut more and more foods from her diet because they made her symptoms worse, and she lost a lot of weight. Now she can only eat between 10 and 15 foods without discomfort.
“It’s really hard for me to remember what it was like to eat food before it was associated with anxiety and pain and discomfort,” she said. .
Guilia Enders, a doctor who wrote a book about the gut, said in the documentary: “If we remove food from our diet, we will radically change our microbes. Because who can live there if you don’t feed them?
The gut microbiome is made up of billions of microbes that live in the lining of the colon. They feed on the food we eat, but different foods feed different microbes.
Later, if a person tries to reintroduce certain foods into their diet, they might experience symptoms such as bloating and stomach pain, Enders said. Dietary fiber is particularly important for gut health because it feeds good microbes, but intake should be increased gradually, she said.
Because Koepke can’t tolerate many nutritious foods, she takes supplements to try to get the nutrients her body needs, but she says she feels deprived of her limited diet. She said she needs to repopulate her gut with healthy bacteria by eating a diverse range of plant foods, but this makes her symptoms worse.
Koepke turned to poop transplants because she felt there were no other options
An FMT begins by mixing a healthy donor’s stool with saline and inserting it into the recipient’s gastrointestinal tract, either through an enema, oral capsules, colonoscopy, or upper endoscopy.
Experts in the documentary have warned against attempting at-home poo transplants, as there is a risk of transferring bad microbes and susceptibility to all sorts of illnesses.
“The microbial community inside our gut can have surprising influences on different parts of our body,” Jack Gilbert, a microbial ecologist at UC San Diego, told Business Insider. Stools are examined before clinical FMTs, and anything that could cause major problems, such as certain pathogens, would be detected, he said. When you do this at home, you don’t have that kind of control.
“With fecal microbiome transplants, there’s some really compelling evidence, but the science is still developing. We’re still working to find out if this actually has benefits for broader populations and if the benefits are long-lasting,” Gilbert said in the documentary.
She had acne like her brother and depression like her boyfriend after FMT
Initially, Koepke made pills for fecal transplantation from stools donated by his brother. She slowly began to gain weight even though she hadn’t changed her diet and was able to go to the bathroom naturally for the first time in three years.
However, she also developed acne, like her brother, who had a history of hormonal acne.
It’s possible that bacteria in the stool could influence inflammation in the recipient’s body, affecting their metabolism and activating their immune response, Gilbert told BI. This would cause changes in their hormonal activity, which could promote acne-causing bacteria on the skin.
“Almost all of us have this bacteria on our skin, but it’s often dormant,” he said.
Koepke decided to change donors and, for a few months, used the feces of her boyfriend for fecal transplants, who had no physical health problems but suffered from depression. After making the change, her acne cleared up, but this time she experienced symptoms of depression.
“As time went on, I realized that my depression was worse than ever in my life,” she said. Koepke believes the microbes that played a role in his depression were transplanted into him.
When Koepke returned to her brother’s poop transplants, the depression disappeared within a week, she said.
Gilbert said that, according to his research, people with depression lack certain bacteria in their gut. “She may have had the antidepressant bacteria in her gut, but when she swapped her microbiome with his, her antidepressant bacteria were eliminated,” he said.
News Source : www.businessinsider.com
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