“Interesting” story today in the WSJ about the consequences of broad spectrum antibiotic use. My favorite bit? I’m so glad you asked.
He added some healthy mice who hadn’t been treated with antibiotics to live with those that had been treated. Mice practice coprophagia—which means they eat each other’s feces.
Compared with mice that didn’t have a healthy cagemate added, the diversity of the gut microbial community in the mice that ingested normal feces was restored to normal.
That seems to echo findings of a retrospective study on humans in 2003. The study looked at 18 patients over a nine-year period who had recurrent C. diff and who had stool transplants performed.
In this case, doctors took stool from a person close to the patient, such as a spouse, and inserted it through a tube into the patient’s nose and from there to the stomach.
The study found 15 patients had no more recurrences. Two patients died of unrelated illnesses and one patient had a single recurrence of C. diff after the transplant.
