Detailed Description: Patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and their healthy family members (living together in the same house) are recruited in the study. CFS has been diagnosed in Tampere University Hospital and the diagnosis is based on thorough clinical assessment fulfilling the Institute of Medicine 2015 criteria. Patients microbiota is analyzed (microbiological analysis, mediators of inflammation) and results are compared with their family members. Via colonoscopy, up to 40 patients with CFS are randomized to receive either a faecal transplant from a healthy donor (treatment group) or his/her own feces (placebo group). Products are blinded, investigators and patients are blinded. Patients' health related quality of life and ability to work or study are assessed (baseline, 1 and 6 months after the procedure). https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04158427
Ideally the beneficial organisme from the donor should colonize the recipient and you shouldn't need more than one. Of course this is a bit difficult as the microbiome is affected by health status, diet, sleep, physical activity levels etc., so the colonizing microbes might not be able to hang around. Some of the beneficial compounds that can be produced by some microbes are also dependent on the environment they are in (access to substrates from diet for example). It will be interesting to compare the results from this study with the one being done in Norway.
No expert on this, but I can't see how transplants are going to fix anything unless it is a localized problem where the homeostasis is topical and not a deeper change where processes are shunting a different composition internally through the tissues to the microbiome. The latter would just keep returning the microbiome to the same abnormal composition immediately. I had a change in microbiome in another area that became permanent after a complicated infection. Something significant happened. Totally different homeostasis. I often wonder if this made me vulnerable to getting ME many years later. Did this change internally eventually tip off ME? Good though we are having microbiome studies - I hope some answers come eventually. Not sure if I will live to see an answer to the problem I have suffered from since I was 20 years old.
