Fecal microbiota transplants are more pseudoscience than science. Research should be done to identify the most relevant microbes within fecal transplants, which could then be isolated and manufactured via industrial fermentation; such standardized products would be more scalable, would reduce the risk of infections from unwanted microbes, and would improve the scientific study of the approach, since the same substance would be administered each time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_microbiota_transplant#Re... This would remove many unnecessary and correlated variables associated with feces transfer, especially when it is being transferred "with the liquid injected through people's noses"! This could benefit from either a medical ethics review or an editorial review of the article.
1. Fecal transplants are pseudoscience, because we don't know if they work.
2. We should assume they work, and identify specific microbes within them that are relevant or dangerous.
That's contradictory. Further, without data from examining #1, #2 is almost impossible - there are at least 1,000 species in our gut at all times. The only identification process I know of that could be reasonably affordable is 16S RNA sequencing, which is still expensive and would be nearly impossible to do properly on the 0.5 - 1.0 kg sample of gut bacteria (yes, that's the weight of just bacteria) from the average human. Not to mention that evidence suggests that gut bacteria act in concert, that is, we'd have to examine combinatorially many combinations of these 1,000+ species to get any real data.
Your comment is hardly understandable, but feces transplant are not pseudoscience and a hope for many autoimmune disease sufferers. I don t know anything about this specific trial though.
Nasojejunal intubation would make more sense than how the article describes the clinic trial. Unfortunately, I am not able to find any documentation regarding the study, which appears to be named "Faecal microbiota transplantation in the management of obesity and type two diabetes mellitus"
I get the issue with standardization of your independent variables, but do consider that trying to identify the "most relevant microbes" might not be as fruitful as you think. A lot of the factors may relate to community level effects, emerging from interaction between a multitude of species.
