Fecal transplants for CDiff

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Specializes in Gerontology, Med surg, Home Health.

I work in long term care. I have a resident who has had Cdiff for close to 19 months. She's had Vanco, Flagyl, and Dificid. Now the family wants her to have a fecal transplant and the doctor is going to agree.

Any of you have any experience with this? She's very old--90+. It seems the cure might be worse than the disease.

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Specializes in Adult Internal Medicine.

How awful! I feel so bad for her.

I have seen several transplants done; the success rate was about 3 of 4 and the complication rate was almost nil. This was before they cracked down on the transplants so I am not quite sure how difficult it would be now to arrange, but if she has a go-ahead I think the benefits outweigh the minimal risks, from both my impression from the literature and from seeing a number of them.

Do you know what method the GI doc uses? I observed insertion via colonoscopy and the risk profile was assumed to be the same as a colonoscopy, about 1/5-10k, nor assuming anesthesia risk or risk from the PEG prep.

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Specializes in ..

Haven't been involved in many but the ones we've done have been successful. We will only do it in cases of repeated failure of standard treatment as you describe. It is really simple. We ask for the donor to be a healthy relative (as close as possible). We have the patient admitted for persistent diarrhea or the like, gi consulted, and schedule inpatient colonoscopy. The patient does the normal colonoscopy prep. The sample is produced by the donor into a urine hat and mixed into a liquid with sterile water, drawn up into several 60cc syringes and injected around the colon as the colonoscopy is done. Usually successful with nil side effects.

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Specializes in retired LTC.

to bsnanat2 - I wondered about the technique. TY for the info.

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