Is It Possible to Cure Crohn's Disease? I Think So

A writer for Psychology Today, contributes the following article (and 2 more that I will post after this article) pertaining to something that I have read up on and firmly believe is the culprit to Crohn's disease.  Everyone should read this information and remember it.  I think a lot of people have been made hopeless or skeptical in regards to Crohn's disease because people are told so many things that contradict that there will ever be a cure.  Doctor's have been telling people for decades now that there will never be a cure.
It's a new day people, get out of the rut of thinking in the past and open your mind to new developements and discoveries.  It's worth it and I am super duper hopeful.

Is There a Cure for Crohn's Disease?   Part 1

|From Psychology Today:

Through luck, hard work, good fortune, perseverance, and wonderful doctors, I seem to be one of the few people in the world who can claim to be “cured” of Crohn’s Disease. I’ve told this story before, in several places, but I feel a need to get the information out to a more general audience, even though this is not a psychology story but a medical and scientific one. In September, 2005, I wrote a small article for the PCC SoundConsumer, a very small newspaper published by a local Seattle natural foods grocery store, about my experience with Crohn’s Disease. http://www.pccnaturalmarkets.com/sc/0509/sc0509-hw-crohns.htm For some reason, that little article went viral, and to this day I receive letters from people from all over the world asking for information about Crohn’s Disease and its probable connection with a specific microbe, mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP). I told the story again in a scientific journal, the Paratuberculosis Newsletter,http://www.paratuberculosis.info/web/images/newsletters/2012q2.pdfBut that journal is not highly visible. Since 8 years has gone by, and I have much more information now, I am going to put this on Psychology Today, for the benefit of all of those who suffer from Crohn’s or who love people who suffer from Crohn’s. I will have to tell this story in several segments, since Psych Today restricts individual posts to about 800 words. Please bear with me. I will be providing a lot of information, references, and information that is crucial to individual and public health.Single case reports are no longer the fashion in modern medicine. We all know that an n of 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 ad infinitum equals nothing in terms of proving causality in “evidence based medicine”. Proving anything in the case of Crohn’s Disease is difficult. See this excellent review of this situation, Causality and gastrointestinal infections: Koch, Hill, and Crohn’s by Anne-Marie Lowe, Cedric P Yansouni, and Marcel A Behr, Lancet Infect Dis 2008:8: 720–26. You must understand that for scientists today, a single case report is virtually meaningless. However, my victory over Crohn’s Disease doesn’t prove anything by itself, but I think that it matters insofar as it suggests the desirability of pursuing a more detailed scientific inquiry. Furthermore, there are hundreds of thousands of people with Crohn’s, many of them children, who are being treated under a different paradigm, and with variable success. Moreover, I think many of those people got sick because they consumed contaminated food products without knowing it, sometimes years before the disease manifested itself. I think there is better way to treat Crohn’s, and better yet, to prevent it. In brief, I think I was “cured” of Crohn’s Disease with antibiotics directed at the eradication of Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis.Background: MAP is a small bacteria in the same family as leprosy and tuberculosis. In 1894, two veterinarians, Dr. H.A. Johne and Dr. L. Frothingham, identified this organism in a cow with weight loss and poor milk production in Germany. It is an acid-fast bacterium, like TB and leprosy, but has other properties as well. The best place to read about MAP is on the web site www.johnes.org
Farmers rapidly learned that their cows could develop either bovine TB or what came to be known as Johne’s Disease. Both were serious and expensive for the farmers. However, for various reasons, everyone agreed that tuberculosis could be transmitted from cows to people, and many public health measures were put into place to stop bovine TB. However, to this day, the USDA and the IOE, the World Organization for Animal Health http://www.oie.int/ deny that MAP is a “zoonotic disease”, a disease that can be transmitted from animals to people. The ostensible reasons for this are that MAP cannot be visualized in human tissues with ordinary microscopes (while it is easy to see MAP in animal specimens); PCR studies and other DNA fingerprinting technologies yield ambiguous results; and nobody dares to try the experiment to prove Koch’s postulates, which would be to grow human MAP in culture, and then feed those germs to human infants. That would be immoral and ridiculous. For various reasons, scientists dispute the claim that MAP causes Crohn’s Disease because Koch’s postulates have not been fulfilled, even though nobody has ever grown M. Leprae (the germ that causes leprosy) in culture. It has to be grown in the foot pads of armadillos…. Koch’s postulates are not applied to viruses, prions, or other pathogens. Even though MAP comes very close to meeting Koch’s postulates, its pathogenicity is disputed. (There was even an experiment in the 1980s in which MAP was grown from human biopsy specimens, and then fed to baby goats. The goats got Johne’s Disease. But it was a small n…)
As a result, animals that test positive for MAP are not culled and eliminated from human food products. They can be sold for meat, into the food supply. Moreover, viable MAP can be cultured from milk, including pastuerized milk, around the world. MAP is a very stubborn bacteria, resistant to heat and chlorine. It thrives on biofilms, and has a persistent spore that can last for years. The incidence of Crohn’s Disease in the world has grown in proportion to the use of dairy products. For example, Japan had little Crohn’s 100 years ago, and now it is becoming a significant problem. When you go to the grocery store and consider buying raw milk products, remember that MAP is endemic to cows, sheep, and goats, and roughly 1% of pasteurized milk in the US contains viable MAP.

Donor Feces Cure Recurrent Diarrheal Infection, Study Shows - Bloomberg

Ummmm lol I still don't know about this.  There's just something that seems wrong about receiving an infusion..... of feces!



Donor Feces Cure Recurrent Diarrheal Infection, Study Shows - Bloomberg:

An infusion of feces through the nose beat the standard antibiotic as a treatment for a recurrent diarrhea-causing infection that kills about 14,000 Americans a year, a study showed.

In a trial among 43 people with recurrent diarrhea caused by a persistent bug called Clostridium difficile, 81 percent of those who received an infusion of feces from a healthy donor after treatment with vancomycin were cured, compared with only 31 percent of those treated with the drug alone, researchers from the University of Amsterdam wrote in an article published yesterday by the New England Journal of Medicine. The study was stopped early because the treatment was clearly working.

The results validate an approach called fecal microbiota transplantation, or FMT, pioneered in 1958 by doctors in Denver, and provides an alternative for the approximately one-in-four patients whose infection isn’t cleared by initial antibiotic treatment. C. difficile is the most common cause of hospital- acquired infectious diarrhea in the U.S. and costs about $1 billion a year to treat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Only patients with the most recalcitrant cases of C. difficile infection are likely to undergo FMT, usually out of desperation after multiple treatment approaches have failed,” Ciaran Kelly, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study. The use of feces may be eliminated by the use of cultured bacteria that make the recipient resistant to C. difficile, Kelly said.

Restoring Bacteria

The procedure probably works by restoring normal gut bacteria, the researchers, led by Els van Nood, wrote in the study, which was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

Vancomycin is sold as Vancocin by ViroPharma Inc. (VPHM) Vancocin accounted for $289 million in sales in 2011, more than half of Exton, Pennsylvania-based ViroPharma’s revenue.

A federal judge last week dismissed the company’s lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over generic forms of the antibiotic developed by Akorn Inc. (AKRX) and Watson Pharmaceuticals Inc. (WPI)

Optimer Pharmaceuticals Inc. (OPTR)’s Dificid, approved for sale in the U.S. in May 2011, was the first drug cleared for the infection in 25 years.

By Simeon Bennett - Jan 17, 2013 6:28 AM ET

Fecal transplants cure diarrhea!! Wow what will they think of next

Interesting!!! Nuff said about this one.

Fecal transplants cure diarrhea, modulate testosterone levels

Nutella was not used as a placebo control.

by John Timmer - Jan 18 2013, 1:35pm EST

From some perspectives, we humans aren't really so much individuals as we are walking ecosystems—our bodies carry more bacterial cells—with their own genomes and agendas—than the total count of human cells we're composed of. Bacteria cover our skin, get to our food before we have the chance to absorb it, and in many cases stay helpfully out of the way of the immune system.

Given all that, it shouldn't be a surprise that we're finding that bacteria can have significant effects on the human body in ways that go well beyond causing an infection. Two articles that appeared this week drive that home. In one, doctors cured a recurring, diarrhea-causing infection simply by transplanting gut bacteria from a healthy individual. And in the second, the bacterial transplants altered the progression of type 1 (autoimmune) diabetes in mice—by altering the animal's testosterone levels.

Fighting bacteria with bacteria

Clostridium difficile, or C. diff, is a bacteria that tends to cause extended bouts of diarrhea. In about 20 percent of the cases that end up under a doctor's care, it will get into the digestive system and refuse to come back out, creating recurring bouts of illness that don't respond to most antibiotics. At that point, the standard of care is an intensive course of vancomycin, which only works in about 60 percent of patients. With each further recurrence, the rate of success goes down even further.

Anecdotal evidence and case reports had suggested that the problem wasn't so much the presence of C. diff as the fact that it had grown out of balance with the rest of the gut's bacterial ecosystem. To get the gut back into balance, fecal transplants had been tried and, anecdotally at least, they worked. So some doctors in the Netherlands decided to do a clinical trial, comparing a fecal transplant to standard care with vancomycin. The trial was what the researchers called "open label," meaning that people were aware they were having a feeding tube stuffed down their nose to deliver someone else's poop into their body. (A Twitter pundit suggested a Nutella infusion might make for a good placebo control.)

A few dozen healthy volunteers were screened for a huge panel of infectious diseases, and those who came through clean were asked to rush their bodies' first deliveries of the day to the hospital, where it was mixed with saline and had the particulates removed. The results then went into the gastro-nasal tube, given to patients after their original gut flora had been cleared out by a "bowel lavage."

The authors had originally planned to get 40 patients for each group, but the fecal transplants were so successful, they stopped the trial after only 16 patients had received a transplant. Of these, 13 (80 percent) were cured after a single transplant. Two of the remaining three were cured after their second, bringing the success rate up to over 90 percent. In contrast, the success rate of vancomycin treatments was down around 30 percent.

The biggest problem? Enrolling patients. Most people who agreed to participate in the trial only did so after conventional treatments failed several times, "reflecting the reluctance of patients and physicians to choose donor-feces infusion at an early stage."

Bacteria, sex, and immunity

It's easy to view this as a demonstration of the hygiene hypothesis, which posits that all sorts of health issues are linked to exposure to a variety of infectious agents, which the immune system then learns to live in harmony with. But a second paper appeared this week that cautioned against viewing things as being quite that simple.

The paper focused on the progression of type 1 diabetes, which is the product of an autoimmune attack on the insulin-producing cells. There's a special strain of mice, called NOD (for non-obese diabetic) that are prone to developing this disorder. The mice show properties that are very much like the human version of the disease: it's genetically complex, the progression is influenced by environmental factors, and it strikes females more severely than males.

And, unexpectedly, it's influenced by gut bacteria. There was some hint of this, given that other researchers had shown that a systematic exposure to bacterial proteins was able to suppress the development of the disease. But the authors found an unexpected effect when they tested how the disorder progressed in mice raised in germ-free conditions. Rather than accelerating the development of symptoms in all mice, the germ-free conditions accelerated the progression in males, making them (at least in this assay) indistinguishable from females.

So the researchers tried an experiment: they took germ-free NOD mice and did a fecal transplant from adult male animals (mice are naturally coprophagic, so the mice took a lot less convincing than did the humans). When female NOD mice received gut bacteria from males, it actually slowed the disease progression down. The apparent sex difference in autoimmune function was mediated in part by gut bacteria.

Your first thought might be that testosterone in males could create a different environment in the gut, causing it to host a different diversity of species. It's a reasonable guess, but it's wrong. Instead, the researchers found that the transplant of gut bacteria caused a surge in testosterone production by females that lasted for up to 14 weeks. This had no effect on the female's fertility, but it did clearly alter immune function. If the authors injected these mice with a testosterone inhibitor, the diabetes protection went away.

All of which indicates that the other intuitive idea—that gut bacteria influence immune function by interacting directly with immune cells—also can't be right, or at least can't be everything. Clearly, the production of testosterone, by whatever cells may be producing it, plays a key role.

Although the papers argue against some of the simpler views of human health—bacteria are all bad, or not having exposure to pathogens means an overactive immune system—they both argue that viewing our bodies as a complex ecosystem can help provide insight into human health.

New England Journal of medicine, 2013. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1205037 and Science, 2013. DOI:10.1126/science.1233521  (About DOIs).

Fecal transplants cure diarrhea, modulate testosterone levels | Ars Technica:

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