Experts around the world are discussing the possibility of creating “bench-stool” for the sake of health. People can store a fecal sample at a young age, which can be used to restore an imbalanced gut microbiome, they say.

You fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) standard treatment for chronic infections caused by Clostridioides difficile, or C.diff. By clearing the gut microbiome with antibiotics and then introducing healthy stools from donors, the microbiome can be reset to prevent the return of harmful C. diff bacteria, explains Gizmodo based on an article published today. The gut microbiome is made up of a variety of bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and fungi that live in the gastrointestinal tract and help the body function.

Of course, scientists know that there will be many problems in creating such a bank of samples. Some of them, just at the beginning, would like to find the ideal storage conditions and cost. Long term cans will likely also require liquid nitrogen storage.

Another point is that it would be difficult to predict “the effect of donor faeces on the recipient microbiome”. Therefore, a more “safe” option would be to store healthy faeces from a young person and then transplant them into the same patient at a later stage in the illness. This concept is known as autologous transplantand is already being used in other areas of medicine.

Harvard professor of medicine Scott T. Weiss also says that “autologous FMTs can treat autoimmune diseases such as asthma, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes, obesity, and even heart disease and aging.”

The proposal comes from researchers from Harvard Medical School It’s from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). The article was published in Molecular Medicine Trends.

Currently, only one major non-profit stool bank in the United States offers people the opportunity to store their own poop.

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Via: Gizmodo Source: Trends in Molecular Medicine