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September 28, 2019 01:30 am

Transferring Vaginal Fluids Could 'Revolutionize' Women's Health, Researchers Say

While fecal transplants have proven to be quite successful, researchers are now experimenting with swapping vaginal fluids to improve health. "If [vaginal microbiota transplants (VMTs)] work as researchers hypothesize, they could rub out many common problems at once," reports Ars Technica. "And based on what we know of vaginas, they could be far less messy than transplants involving poop." From the report: The basic idea behind VMTs is identical to that of poop transplants, aka fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs), which have been around for centuries. Generally, FMTs aim to use microbe-laden bodily products -- in this case excrement -- to introduce or restore rich, complex microbial communities into the innards of ailing recipients. In healthy human intestines, thriving microbial inhabitants are involved in everything from cycling hormones and influencing immune responses to protecting from pathogenic germs, not to mention helping extract nutrients from food. When these communities die off, get out of balance (a condition generally called dysbiosis), or become overrun by disease-causing germs, our health can wane. That's where FMTs come in. Modern FMT recipients now take in the goods by piping them into their bowels, gulping them in capsules, or injecting them in enemas. And researchers are looking into using FMTs to treat a range of conditions including obesity, food allergies, inflammatory bowel disease, depression and multiple sclerosis. But despite the fact that the medicine has come a long way from serving poopy soup, researchers are still straining to squeeze out all of FMTs potential. So far, the only condition for which there's firm evidence that FMTs are effective is recalcitrant Clostridium difficile infections, which cause severe diarrhea -- echoing the centuries-old uses of FMTs. [...] Vaginal microbiota transplants, on the other hand, may not face such onerous hurdles. Based on what researchers have gathered so far, the microbial communities of a healthy vagina are relatively simple compared with that of the gut, and they play key roles in health.

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