A woman who was sick by a pesky bacterium got treated with a revolutionary transplant but gained a lot of weight in the process.
The 32-year-old woman, who remains unidentified, was one of the thousands of people who suffered from a bacterium known as Clostridium difficile. It causes moderate to severe gastrointestinal problems including but not limited to diarrhea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. It also leads to death when it becomes uncontrolled.
Although some patients respond to antibiotics, it's also possible the medication itself leads to recurrence. Many studies have shown how bacterium tends to reproduce faster and become more aggressive when a patient has gone through medication.
The woman can't be treated with antibiotics, and so the next option was a stool transplant. Also referred to as fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), it is a process of introducing another person's stool into the patient's body in order to regrow a healthy bacterial culture that can ultimately eliminate Clostridium difficile. The stool may be introduced through medical instruments like tubes or stool capsules.
Either way, it has a very high success rate, and the woman was eventually healed of the infection. However, she also gained weight-at lot of it.
Although Dr. Colleen Kelly is careful with associating the patient's drastic weight gain to the procedure, the woman did experience it only a few years after the transplantation. Moreover, the donor, her own daughter, was already borderline obese. Before the procedure, her body mass index (BMI) was 26. However, within 3 years, she ballooned to a BMI of a little less than 35, making her obese. She's gained a total of 36 pounds. The patient felt as if something has just changed all of a sudden with the way her body works, and her weight problems continue until today.
This circumstance eventually forced Dr. Kelley to screen donors, accepting only those who have a healthy BMI. OpenBiome, a non-profit organization based in Medford, Massachusetts, and is currently paying stool donors up to $250 a week, also uses a healthy BMI as a qualification.
