A woman whose c.difficile infection was treated with a fecal transplant from her overweight daughter experienced rapid and dramatic weight gain as soon as her daughter's microbial nation took hold in her gut.
It's evidence to support the thesis that obesity is linked to your gut flora, which plays an important role in regulating metabolism and in converting the food you eat to calories. What would be very interesting would be the reverse: overweight people who lost weight dramatically after getting fecal transplants from skinny people (there has been some success with this in animal models).
The 32-year old woman, who has not been indentified, had an infection that could not be treated with even the most powerful antibiotics.
Dr Colleen Kelly, from the Medical School at Brown University, said the option of a faecal transplant was discussed and the woman wanted to use a relative – her daughter.
The daughter was overweight at the time and was in the process of becoming obese.
The procedure did clear the infection.
But Dr Kelly told the BBC News website: "She came back about a year later and complained of tremendous weight gain.
"She felt like a switch flipped in her body, to this day she continues to have problems."
Woman's stool transplant leads to 'tremendous weight gain' [James Gallagher/BBC]
(Image: Galaxy Ripple split, Bodo, CC-BY)
