A (yucky!) remedy for heart disease and asthma

...if you can stomach it

COULD freezing your own stool sample when you are young and healthy be the secret to fighting illness later in life? That’s the unsavoury suggestion from a group of U.s. medics who say putting faecal matter on ice at -80c for several decades, before thawing it and putting it back inside the body when you get ill, could help combat everything from the side-effects of chemotherapy to asthma and heart disease.

The scientists, from harvard Medical school and Brigham and Women’s hospital, both in Boston, U.s., say preserving stool samples in this way could be a good insurance policy against ill health.

‘It would be similar to when parents bank their baby’s umbilical cord blood for possible future use,’ they wrote in the journal Trends in Molecular Medicine in June.

Cord blood is rich in stem cells which can potentially grow into any type of healthy new tissue when placed back in the body. stem cells extracted from donor cord blood are already used to treat certain blood cancers.

In the UK, there are seven privately run umbilical cord blood banks, taking around 27,000 deposits a year in total. Parents using the service must pay a clinic about £100 a year to keep the sample frozen, in case their child develops a serious illness for which there may be no effective treatments.

The Nhs accepts donated cord blood for use in medical treatment but doesn’t offer a storage service. And there’s no evidence that stored umbilical cord blood has yet been used to treat children.

But can freezing faeces in our youth come to our rescue if we get sick years later?

The theory is that when we’re young and in peak physical condition — in our teens or early20s, say the researchers — so, too, is our gut microbiome, the intestinal ‘soup’ made up of trillions of microbes.

This microbial mixture is thought to be crucial for keeping a host of illnesses at bay, including obesity, heart disease, food allergies, dementia and even, according to some studies, Covid-19.

Any imbalance in the ratio of good and bad bacteria in the gut may increase the risk of these conditions.

And because faecal matter is thought to contain the same bugs found in our guts, it’s potentially a rich source of the healthy microbes we might need later to restore the bacterial balance to normal.

Despite the yuck factor, faecal matter transplants, where poo from a healthy person is deposited into the patient’s gut (through a tube into the stomach via the nose or rectum, or they swallow a capsule with the donor sample that’s been treated and dehydrated), are sanctioned by NICE to treat C. difficile infection.

ThIs gut infection kills around 1,600 people a year in the UK — those at risk include hospital patients being treated with antibiotics, as well as the elderly and those whose immune systems have been weakened by, for example, chemotherapy (which wipes out ‘good’ bacteria, allowing ‘bad’ bacteria, such as C. difficile, to flourish).

Transplanting faecal matter from a healthy donor into an infected patient can restore levels of good bacteria and keep C. difficile at bay.

such is the demand for donated poo samples that the Microbiome Treatment Centre, a Birminghambased clinic that pays healthy volunteers up to £100 for their donated faeces, has been approved by the Medicines and healthcare products Regulatory Authority to supply the Nhs with faecal samples to use in C. difficile treatment.

While the centre does not currently freeze samples on behalf of patients for their later use, at least one clinic in the U.s., OpenBiome in somerville, Massachusetts, is reportedly offering the public the chance to do so, for an undisclosed fee. This currently only applies for C. difficile infection, if they one day get it.

But stool storage centres may have no shortage of customers if current research leads to them getting the green light to supply faecal transplants for other conditions.

FOR example, one recent study found that giving some cancer patients a deposit from their own stools helped them cope with the toxic effects of chemotherapy drugs.

In a trial at the sorbonne University in Paris, France, published in Nature Communications in May 2021, stool samples were collected from 25 patients just before having chemotherapy for leukaemia.

Once the chemo was completed, doctors transplanted the healthy faecal matter back into half the patients; the rest had a placebo treatment.

In those given a faecal transplant, the microbiome was rapidly restored to its healthy pre-treatment state, with normal levels of ‘good’ bacteria dampening down inflammation.

so should we soon be banking our own waste as a future treatment?

‘At the moment, there isn’t enough scientific evidence to support this,’ says Dr Duane Mellor, a dietitian and a lecturer in gastroenterology at Aston University Medical school in Birmingham.

‘For example, you can’t just assume the bacteria in your stool is exactly the same as in your gut.’

That’s because there are several metres of intestinal tissue to pass through and the environment along it changes significantly.

Another issue is storage: there have been concerns that umbilical cord blood might not survive the freezing process for years.

Tempting as it may sound to bank stools for future use, Dr Mellor says: ‘I can think of much better ways to spend money on improving our health.’