A Canadian man living with Crohn’s disease says that he found symptom relief after giving himself fecal microbiota transplants using his mother’s feces. 

According to news sources, Charlie Curtis, who is in his 30s, says that he had “debilitating Crohn's disease.” Curtis was initially diagnosed with ulcerative colitis (UC) in 2006 and then developed  CD. Curtis was medicated, but the treatment failed to relieve his symptoms, which he says caused him to use the bathroom 40 times a day.

Kenny S. A man gave himself poop transplants using his mom’s feces to treat his debilitating Crohn’s. Then he started experiencing her menopause symptoms. Insider.

 

 

CD and UC fall under the inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) umbrella, both impacting the gastrointestinal tract. About one-third of patients with CD will have small bowel involvement, but another 20% will experience only colon involvement. 50% experience both. CD is incurable but manageable, although it runs a relapsing and remitting course.

Ranasinghe IR, Hsu R. Crohn disease. In: StatPearls. StatPearls Publishing; 2023.

 

 

Curtis’s mother was “[d]esperate for her son to get his life back,” leading her to contact Thomas Borody, MD, Director of the Centre for Digestive Diseases (CDD) in Sydney, Australia, reports Business Insider. According to the CDD, Dr. Borody began performing FMT treatments in the 1980s and has performed over 12,000 surgeries to date. Borody encouraged Curtis’s mother to donate her healthy stools to her son.

Kenny S. A man gave himself poop transplants using his mom’s feces to treat his debilitating Crohn’s. Then he started experiencing her menopause symptoms. Insider.

 

 

Many people performing DIY FMTs do so using a blender, a strainer, and typically an enema bottle.” It may sound risky, but there are communities of DIY poop transplant enthusiasts across social media who share their tips, techniques, and supposed success stories, Business Insider reports. There’s even a documentary called “Designer Shit” that explores the topic.

Medaris A. People are turning to YouTube and Facebook to learn how to do DIY fecal transplants, hoping to treat everything from ulcerative colitis to anxiety. Insider.

 

 

Curtis and his mother performed the DIY FMT “‘every day for a month, then every two days for a month, then every third day for a month.’” When they got down to one treatment a month, they did it for 3.5 years. 

Curtis told Business Insider that when he was doing the procedure, he’d "feel tingling inside of [him]. It felt healthy, it felt like it was working."

 

Risk and efficacy associated with FMT

 

What the Curtises and others like them are doing is risky, experts say. FMTs are only FDA-approved for treating Clostridium difficile (C. diff) infections, says Anurag Maheshwari, MD, a board-certified gastroenterologist at the Institute for Digestive Health & Liver Disease at Mercy in Baltimore, MD. Dr. Maheshwari has over 10 years of experience performing FMTs.

Dr. Maheshwari cites two New York–based immunocompromised patients who were exposed to antibiotic-resistant E. coli bacteria after an FMT procedure. One died.

News ABC. Doctors explain how patient died from fecal transplant. ABC News.

 

 

Furthermore, he says, the literature on FMT for Crohn’s treatment is “extremely controversial, and the results of studies are mixed.”

One 2021 systematic review published in the Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology found that while “[p]reliminary studies suggest that FMT may be an effective therapy in Crohn's disease…large controlled trials are needed.” Other findings published in 2020 stated that most of the research done on FMT for IBD focused on UC, not CD.

Fehily SR, Basnayake C, Wright EK, Kamm MA. Fecal microbiota transplantation therapy in Crohn’s disease: Systematic review. J Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2021;36(10):2672-2686.

Sokol H, Landman C, Seksik P, et al. Fecal microbiota transplantation to maintain remission in Crohn’s disease: a pilot randomized controlled study. Microbiome. 2020;8(1):12.

 

 

Researchers have also looked at FMT for treating other conditions, including fatty liver disease, alcoholic liver disease, and celiac disease, Dr. Maheshwari notes.  “Again, we believe that there are multiple conditions that may be affected by gut health, and people have postulated that FMT might help, but the data is inconsistent,” he adds. “As a gastroenterologist, the only patient type I'd recommend FMT for is one with C. DIFF recurrent infection.”

Kyle S. Eldredge, DO, a board-certified colorectal surgeon, says that there’s a reason FMT isn’t a go-to CD treatment: “FMT is approved for C. DIFF because that’s a bacterial organism that takes over the microbiota. [However], the issue with Crohn’s is that it’s a systemic autoimmune disease. It doesn't just affect the gut; it has ocular, musculoskeletal, and skin effects.”

When a patient with CD has limited success with medicine, surgery may be the next best option, Dr. Elderedge says: “We can do surgery to address whatever portion of the GI tract is affected. We can repair or take parts of the small intestine or large intestine out.”

The placebo effect may play a role in the success associated with DIY FMTs, Dr. Maheshwari says. With CD patients, he says, “there seems to be a very strong  placebo response. There are significant hormonal changes that affect gut health as well. I’m not saying CD is all in their heads, but things like stress and anxiety trigger hormone productions that can affect gut health in negative ways.”

According to findings from a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of patients with irritable bowel syndrome ( IBS) published in Gut, patients who received a placebo (versus those who received FMT capsules) “experienced greater symptom relief compared with the FMT group after three months.”

Halkjær SI, Christensen AH, Lo BZS, et al. Faecal microbiota transplantation alters gut microbiota in patients with irritable bowel syndrome: results from a randomised, double-blind placebo-controlled study. Gut. 2018;67(12):2107-2115.

 

 

However, another study that looked at both IBS and IBD found that the “size of the placebo response appears to be somewhat higher in IBS than in IBD, but in both cases, the contribution of the spontaneous course of the disease (e.g., spontaneous symptom recovery and remission) may contribute 50% or more to the placebo response.”

Enck P, Klosterhalfen S. The placebo and nocebo responses in clinical trials in inflammatory bowel diseases. Front Pharmacol. 2021;12:641436.