Anorexic patient recovers thanks to fecal transplant in Jiangsu

A 26-year-old woman who was dying due to excessive weight loss recently pulled through after receiving a fecal transplant from a healthy individual, and was discharged from hospital in Nanjing of Jiangsu province on Oct 26, according to recent report from a local newspaper.

Ting Ting (alias), 26, went from weighing 100 kilograms to 25 kg in the span of eight years. However, the 175-centimeter-tall woman was also at death's door. When the ambulance reached the Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University in Jiangsu province in May, Ting Ting was diagnosed with anorexia, severe malnutrition, multiple organ failure, anemia and disturbance of consciousness, according to report of Yangtse Evening Post, a local newspaper in Nanjing on Tuesday.

Back to 2015, when she was 18, she was eager to lose weight. "I used to be a super fat girl," she said. She succeeded reducing to 65 kg by dieting and doing exercise. However, she later developed serious constipation.

After learning about a drug that can help manage bowel movement regularity, she bought it. At first she took one pill a day. After noticing that the drug also helped her to reduce her weight, she increased the dose. After several years, she developed an addiction. By the end, she was taking six to nine pills each time.

In 2019, her health condition became abnormal. When she was only 25 kg, she can barely eat anything. Her mother took her to see doctors in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou in Zhejiang province, but none of her treatments were effective. In late April, Ting Ting experienced severe organ damage, accompanied by symptoms such as internal bleeding, blood in her stool, fluid buildup in the tissue surrounding her lungs, and sever bloating. She was in a coma, as the report said.

She was sent to the intensive care units of two hospitals in her hometown Dalian, Liaoning province, but the treatment failed. Her mother asked for help online and doctor Zhang Faming, famous in microecology medicine, replied. Then the family rode 19 hours in an ambulance to meet the doctor in Jiangsu province.

Zhang said her condition was far more serious than he had imagined in the report, adding that she was bleeding from multiple places such as her ears, nose, mouth and urethra, and it was difficult to control.

After discussions with many renowned experts, they decided to treat her with a fecal transplant, using technology that involves the transplant of fecal matter from a healthy individual, which has undergone washing and purification in a pharmaceutical-grade laboratory, into the patient's intestinal tract to restore a normal gut flora and achieve therapeutic effects for treating diseases.

After three courses of treatment and nursing rehabilitation, Ting Ting's weight had increased to 45 kg, and her overall body functions gradually recovered.