Autism symptoms almost halved 2 years after fecal transplant

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In my country there have recently been claims that dietary modification and promoting optimal gut health have "cured" autism in young children. The parents claim that by eliminating additives, artificial colouring and chemicals the children's neurodiversity was reversed. I don't know how credible this is.

I do know that when trying to control my son's ADHD when he was young the elimination of sugar and artificial additives improved his behaviour to a certain extent, specifically he was less hyper, but did not reverse the fundamental pathology of impulsivity, cognitive impairment and lack of ability to filter surrounding stimuli. He now is vegan and believes that it provides relief.

I personally think poor nutrition exacerbates brain pathology but is not the root cause.
I have ADD and simple carbs and sugar render me almost katatonic with fatigue and I totally lose my clarity of thought. Sugar breeds Candida and Candida gobbles up all the normal gut flora. Then we are up the proverbial sh.ts creek.

So..... a healthy gut really must be beneficial. Don't see any harm in Fecal Transplants.

I don't like the tone of the article.

They don't recognize that the same numbers of autistic individuals grew up in every generation - most of them just did not have any diagnoses before.

That seems not bad. If the treatment boosts autistic individuals' well-being to the point they function a lot better, it's worth every penny. But I don't see any meta-analysis to screen for placebo effect or to take other treatments into account (including the "treatments" aimed at making the symptoms invisible, which always bother me).

So now they're telling us the cure for aspergers turned out to be ass burgers? Good grief!

There's a sentence you never thought you'd have to write!

Well, if one can get past the ick factor (big "if"), fecal transplants have worked wonders for patients suffering from treatment-resistant C. diff. infections and have incidentally helped people to lose weight when the donor is normal weight and the recipient happens to be overweight or obese. In fact being normal weight is now a requirement for donation. It appears to completely change how your gut functions, with a tremendous ripple effect throughout the body.

As to whether it could be a potential autism "cure," I highly doubt it. It can't change the structure of the brain. However it may very well help illnesses such as depression, anxiety and ADHD which often afflict people with autism. The influence of gut flora on hormones and mood is becoming a topic of intense study, with many researchers terming the gut "the second brain" because of its surprisingly strong influence on the mind.

A healthy diet that promotes beneficial bacteria probably is tremendously helpful to people with mental illness. The catch-22 is that people suffering from mental illness often don't have the best diets (I certainly can't whip up a fresh, healthy organic meal while in the throes of a depressive episode. I do really well just to stagger to the microwave!) and the existing bacteria in your gut can influence what foods you crave. Newsflash: they're going to make you crave whatever feeds them, such as sugar. That's where a fecal transplant from a healthy individual might really be of help.

Still, it is pretty gross if you allow yourself to think about it. If I was to go for it I would have to force the nitty gritty details out of mind and focus only on the outcome. Kind of like sticking your fingers in your ears and singing, "La la la... I can't hear you!"

This one made my day. Thank you.

Yes, of course I think this is promising.

No, they aren’t even close to the same thing or doctors would just prescribe eating yogurt. Yogurt may have a handful of strains of beneficial bacteria, but a balanced human gut microbiome has 10’s or 100’s of thousands.

People don’t “take in someone else’ poo,” in a fecal bacteria transplant - only the beneficial bacteria. All food matter and fibrous material are strained out. It’s only the good bacteria that are transferred - could be via enema, could be dehydrated in a gel cap.

I want to hear why, if healthy gut bacteria halves autism symptoms, unhealthy or dead gut bacteria (e.g. taking high strength antibiotics) doesn't increase autism symptoms.

It does!

I have been reporting that here for several years, too. That every time I get sick and take antibiotics, which has almost always been doxycycline, my ASD symptoms return with a vengeance & I have to make a concentrated effort via diet, mass amounts of probiotics, and intestinal cleanses etc to rebalance my gut and return to my extremely high functioning self.

Some antibiotics seem to make symptoms worse and others better in some people. There’s a guy, a statistician iirc, who noticed this in his autistic son and conducted experiments on him. He calls his website NofOne.org I think.

Anyways, I’ve been sharing here for several years that with a bottle of doxycycline and a bottle of salicylic acid and a piss poor diet I can send myself straight back to asd hell for any doctor or layman to observe, and then via diet, supplements, intestinal cleanses and probiotics I can bounce right back and likely be considered to have asd traits but not strong enough for an official diagnosis. ‘Tie the same truth I’ve been sharing here for 7 years or so now.

This is incorrect. There isn't a defined version of "good bacteria" or "bad bacteria," and the science isn't well enough understood to determine which bacteria was needed. What they do is take the bacteria from a healthy donor and hope that is correct.

Furthermore in the only double-blind study on FMT treatment for C. difficile infection. Self FMT had a cure rate of ~44% (as opposed to 90% from a healthy donor), which shows that it is poorly understood what is actually happening during the process of FMT.

This thread has got me rolling about, laughing. There isn't a cure for ASDs and I hope there never is.

This does kind of make sense to me since GI issues are reported to be more common among people on the autism spectrum than among people who are not on the spectrum. I do wonder if it might help some people with autism. But then you have people like me, who are on the autism spectrum but seem to have perfectly healthy GI systems (at least, I did until a few months ago). Would it help these people? I'm less sure of that. I do believe that there are probably multiple causes of autism, and in some cases the primary factor could be related to unhealthy gut flora.

Granted, even if I had any reason to believe it would help me specifically, I still wouldn't get a fecal transplant because I have a legitimate phobia of internal parasites and probably nothing could convince me there was a one hundred percent chance I wouldn't get them from that (I know it's irrational, that's part of what makes it a real phobia).

I’ve read in the past that there are specific strains commonly missing in autistics. And also that it seems it’s having a wide variety of gut bacteria vs high quantities of few strains that make people function better.

Which specific strains I haven’t committed to memory. Feel free to google if you like.

But there are in fact strains of bacteria identified as bad for people. + other organisms like fungi & overgrowth did intestinal yeasts etc.

It’s true that the gut microbiome is still being explore, though.

In the meantime, even without micro details, I’ve already learned by doing that altering my gut bacteria dramatically improves asd symptoms - and I’ve been doing it for 7 years now.

i used to laugh at this BUT now i'm willing to try anything to fix myself, this included.


guys....give me your poop!! !

It’s not quite that simple - don’t do that; could be dangerous ie make you sick/potentially be fatal. That’s why fecal donors are screened/tested for C. difficile & other pathogens, and all food/fibre material is removed leaving only the various bacteria behind.

Before going to this level, you could try some of the things I have done to alter my own gut bacteria and in turn treat my symptoms. I’m always open to discussing these things either here in the open or in private.