- Daniel Koepke turned to a DIY poop transplant to alleviate debilitating intestinal symptoms.
- She used her brother and boyfriend as donors, and her symptoms improved.
- However, like her brother, she suffered from acne, and like her boyfriend, she became depressed.
When Daniel Koepke was in college, he began experiencing symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, including indigestion, stinging pain from trapped gas, and severe constipation.
After five years of seeing doctors and seeing no results, Koepke decided to try an experimental treatment called fecal microbiota (or DIY poop) transplantation. This involves introducing feces from a healthy donor into the patient's intestine to repopulate the patient's “good” microorganisms. She used her brother and boyfriend as donors, she said in the Netflix documentary Hacking Your Health: Secrets of the Gut.
FMT is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for C diff only. A growing body of research suggests there is a link between gut health and mental and physical health, leading scientists to study them as potential treatments for many conditions, including depression. doing.
Although some of Koepke's symptoms improved, she said she started getting acne like her brother and later became depressed, like her boyfriend.
A similar experience was documented in the 2023 documentary “Designer $hit.” A man in his mid-30s with Crohn's disease underwent years of DIY poop transplants using his mother as a donor. Although they seemed to relieve his intestinal symptoms, he, like his menopausal mother, experienced menopausal symptoms such as sweating, hot flashes, and mood swings.
Thomas Borody, director of the Center for Digestive Diseases in Sydney, Australia, which pioneered FMT treatment in the 1980s, told Designer Hit that it was possible that the man absorbed the hormones from her poop. He said the link has not been proven.
Reducing food from her diet made things worse.
Koepke's gut symptoms, which she believes are the result of a diet high in refined sugar and low in fiber, didn't fit neatly into the box. Doctors were at a loss as to what to do and prescribed antibiotics “like candy,” she said.
For the past five years, she has been taking six courses of antibiotics per year. But they didn't help. Research has shown that antibiotics can kill the good bacteria in your gut.
As her illness worsened, Koepke cut out more and more of the foods that made her symptoms worse, and she lost a lot of weight. Currently, she can only eat 10-15 different foods without feeling discomfort.
“It's really hard to remember what it was like to eat food before it became associated with anxiety, pain, and discomfort,” she says.
Gillia Enders, a doctor who has written a book about the gut, said in the documentary, “If we eliminated food from our diet, our microbiome would change dramatically, because we don't feed it. If not, who would live there?”
The gut microbiome is made up of trillions of microorganisms that live in the lining of the colon. They feed on the food we eat, but different foods feed on different microorganisms.
Then, when you try to introduce certain foods back into your diet, you can experience symptoms such as bloating and abdominal pain, Enders said. Fiber is particularly important for gut health because it feeds good bacteria, but intake should be increased gradually, he said.
Koepke has a hard time eating a lot of nutritious food, so she takes supplements to get the nutrients her body needs, but she feels like she's being deprived of nutrients when her diet is restricted. He said he was there. She needs to repopulate her gut with healthy bacteria by eating a variety of plant foods, which she said can make her symptoms worse.
Koepke turned to poop transplants because she felt she had no other options.
FMT begins by mixing healthy donor feces with saline and inserting it into the recipient's gastrointestinal tract via enema, oral capsule, colonoscopy, or upper endoscopy.
Experts in the documentary warned against attempting poo transplants at home due to the risk of transferring bad microorganisms and making you more susceptible to all sorts of illnesses.
“The microbial community in our gut can have surprising effects on different parts of our bodies,” Jack Gilbert, a microbial ecologist at the University of California, San Diego, told Business Insider. She said stool screening will be done before clinical FMT to detect anything that could cause serious problems, such as certain pathogens. If you do this at home, you will not be able to get such a test.
“There is really compelling evidence for fecal microbiome transplantation, but the science is still developing. Whether it actually benefits a wider range of people, and whether those benefits last for a long time. , we're still researching,'' Gilbert said in the documentary.
After FMT, she developed acne like her brother and depression like her boyfriend.
Initially, Koepke made a fecal transplant drug from stool donated by his brother. Although he did not change his diet, his weight gradually began to increase, and for the first time in three years he was able to go to the bathroom naturally.
But she developed acne, as did her brother, who had a history of hormonal acne.
Bacteria in the stool can affect inflammation in the recipient's body by affecting metabolism and activating an immune response, Gilbert told BI. This causes changes in hormonal activity and can lead to the growth of acne-causing bacteria on the skin.
“Almost all of us have this bacteria on our skin, but it's often dormant,” he says.
Koepke decided to change donors and for several months used the feces of her boyfriend, who had no physical health problems but was suffering from depression. After switching, my acne went away, but now I started having symptoms of depression.
“As time went on, I realized that my depression was worse than it had ever been in my life,” she said. Koepke said she believes the microbes that were affecting his depression were implanted into her.
When Koepke went back to transplanting her brother's poop, her depression disappeared within a week, she said.
Gilbert said his research shows that people with depression lack certain bacteria in their guts. “She may have had 'antidepressant' bacteria in her gut, but when she replaced her microbiome with his, her antidepressant bacteria were wiped out,” he said. To tell.