WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 (Xinhua) -- A fecal transplant from a lean donor can temporarily improve insulin resistance in obese men but the success might depend on the recipient's gut microbes, according to results of a small clinical trial in the Netherlands.
The findings, published Tuesday in the U.S. journal Cell Metabolism, could help shape the development of personalized fecal transplant for diabetes.
"We have now shown that you can categorize people based on their fecal samples," senior author Max Nieuwdorp of the Department of Internal and Vascular Medicine at the University of Amsterdam said in a statement. "This allows us to classify diseases with more sensitivity."
In this randomized control trial, the researchers recruited 38 obese men with metabolic syndrome, a condition that includes high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and excess fat.
They also recruited 11 lean donors with a healthy microbiota and then randomly paired obese men with a lean donor.
Six weeks after the obese men received fecal material from a lean donor, half of them saw a decrease in insulin resistance, a major risk factor for type II diabetes, whereas the other half saw no change.
The researchers then compared the pre-treatment microbiota of both groups and found that the non-responders were the ones who started off with less bacterial diversity.
These were only short-term changes, though.
Three months later, the microbiota for all recipients had gone back to their original states.
The researchers said the results of this study can help future researchers predict the success of fecal-transplant studies.
If recipients' fecal samples are screened beforehand, then the treatments can become more personalized.
"We have shown some major effects and started to see that there could be some real power to treat people by replenishing missing intestinal bacterial strains," Nieuwdorp said.
