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How does a fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) resolve many conditions and chronic symptoms (like diarrhea and itchy skin) in cats and dogs? “Fecal transplant” might sound strange or gross at first, but it’s a well-established treatment approach that has been used effectively in both animals and humans for a very long time.
In pets, FMT can help with chronic digestive symptoms like diarrhea, constipation, and vomiting, as well as skin issues, such as itching and hair loss. So what exactly is FMT?
A fecal microbiota transplant (FMT), also called a fecal transplant, is the transfer of stool from a healthy donor to the gastrointestinal (GI) tract of a sick recipient. That transfer can be done in a veterinary clinic (via colonoscopy, enema, or endoscopy) or at home with oral capsules. The stool from the donor contains a diverse, well-functioning community of bacteria that take up residence in the recipient’s gut.
By providing thousands of healthy, species-appropriate gut bacteria, FMT can alleviate a variety of symptoms associated with imbalance or dysfunction of the gut microbiome—including digestive disorders like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), chronic enteropathies, colitis, atopic dermatitis, and immune system issues.
Fecal transplant is one of the best approaches for restoring an imbalanced gut microbiome, and is proven to be an effective treatment in both companion animals and humans.
As research dives deeper into the connections between microbiome imbalances (dysbiosis) and health problems, we’ll continue to learn even more. In pets, fecal transplants have proven to be especially useful for the two realms of health concerns that account for over 50% of visits to veterinarians (DVMs): digestive issues and skin issues.
Digestive symptoms in pets, such as diarrhea, constipation, vomiting, and weight loss can have many different underlying causes. If other explanations (e.g. sensitivities, parasites, infectious disease) have been ruled out, pets experiencing these symptoms likely have an imbalanced gut microbiome.
An imbalance among the gut’s bacterial populations may occur as a result of advanced age, poor diet, medications (especially antibiotics), and other factors.
For example, the genus Escherichia (a group of bacteria that includes E. coli) can be a beneficial member of the community when it makes up only a small part of a cat or dog’s gut microbiome. But an overgrowth of Escherichia can cause diarrhea and other uncomfortable digestive issues. FMT can resolve diarrhea quickly by introducing a whole community of beneficial bacteria that crowd out the harmful ones, restoring healthy function to the digestive system.
Research has shown that long-lasting or recurring skin issues in cats and dogs—such as red or itchy skin, hair loss, and recurrent ear infections—have a connection to the gut microbiome. That’s because skin conditions are often caused by an exaggerated immune system response, and the large majority of the body’s immune cells are located in the gut.
In addition to interfering with proper immune function, an imbalanced gut microbiome can cause the intestinal walls to become more permeable, or “leaky” (a factor that’s associated with food allergies). Both of these effects—a compromised immune system and a leaky gut—can show up in your pet as skin problems. A dysfunctional gut environment is also more prone to inflammation, which can trigger hyperactive immune responses all over the body.
Itching and other skin problems may be a clue that your cat or dog’s gut microbiome is imbalanced. Learn more about testing your pet’s gut microbiome with AnimalBiome’s gut health test kits to make an informed decision about how best to manage your pet’s symptoms.
Read more about atopic dermatitis and the gut microbiome: Managing Atopic Dermatitis in Pets
In-clinic veterinary fecal transplant procedures can be expensive, and often require sedation. That’s why AnimalBiome developed its one-of-a-kind fecal transplant in an oral capsule, offering a convenient and safe approach to fecal transplants for cats and dogs.
The Gut Restore Supplement is an oral FMT capsule that gives your cat or dog the benefits of FMT without the need for surgery or sedation. Our Gut Restore Supplement capsules deliver viable cat- or dog-specific bacterial cells in the form of carefully screened, cryoprotected, freeze-dried donor stool. Stable at room temperature, the capsules offer a noninvasive, affordable, at-home alternative for pets suffering from digestive, skin, or immune system issues.
In a study conducted by AnimalBiome, 72 cats and 40 dogs with confirmed or suspected IBD were given a 25-day course of our Gut Restore Supplement. Symptoms improved in 83% of the cats, and in 80% of dogs. About half of the dogs and a quarter of the cats had a healthy increase in appetite. This study demonstrates that FMT can be an effective tool to improve symptoms and increase quality of life for cats and dogs living with IBD.
By “seeding” your cat or dog’s gut microbiome with a healthy and balanced community of bacteria, our FMT capsules can help restore gut microbiome health and stop symptoms at their source.
When pets with digestive symptoms and skin issues are missing important gut bacteria, it’s important to add those missing members to the gut microbiome and help the new populations grow and thrive.
Unlike standard probiotics, our Gut Restore Supplements provides a whole community of thousands of different kinds of bacteria and other microbes that are native to healthy cats or dogs. The capsule’s enteric coating prevents it from dissolving until it reaches the intestines, where the contents seed your pet’s gut with a diverse array of healthy bacteria, restoring any missing groups.
If your pet’s Gut Microbiome Health Test report shows an overgrowth of harmful bacteria, restoring balance will require removing or reducing those troublesome groups. FMT capsules can help in this scenario too, through a process called competitive exclusion. The new beneficial bacteria from the FMT thrive and multiply, taking resources and space away from the harmful bacteria, which gradually die out.
Gut Restore Supplement capsules contain a diverse community of thousands of different kinds of healthy gut bacteria native to cats or dogs. Diversity is important because each type of bacteria has a specific job to do to support the pet’s health. Gut Restore Supplementhelps resolve symptoms by giving the cat or dog’s gut microbiome the important organisms it needs to function properly.
While outcomes vary, positive results—such as better-formed stool, improved appetite, and less itching— are usually noticeable within days, while establishing a healthier microbiome occurs within a few weeks. It may take longer to see improvement in cats and dogs with severe gut microbiome imbalances, or those with underlying health conditions.
One of the biggest risks of FMT is that poorly screening donor material can introduce pathogens and/or parasites onto the recipient. AnimalBiome goes to great lengths to provide customers with the safest FMT material available. The healthy cats and dogs that serve as AnimalBiome’s donors must pass a rigorous selection process, including DNA testing for microbiome composition, and all donor material is extensively screened for pathogens and parasites.
If you choose to have a fecal transplant procedure performed by a veterinarian, it’s important to ask about their screening process for the donated fecal material. In addition, more invasive FMT procedures generally require sedation, which has its own associated risks and complications.
AnimalBiome maintains the world’s largest fecal microbiome stool bank for cats and dogs, and we lead the way in best practices for fecal transplants in companion animals. This includes rigorous screening of donor stool, as well as screening of the donors themselves for health, medication history, behavior, and gut microbiome composition. These practices are important both for the success of the fecal transplant and for the safety of the animals involved.
We’ve also set the benchmark for how to conduct pet microbiome studies, and help pet food companies determine whether their products are microbiome-friendly.
Our Gut Restore Supplements are derived from stool donated by healthy cats or dogs that live in homes and eat a balanced diet. In addition, donor fecal samples are submitted for parasite and pathogen screening to theIDEXX Reference Laboratories, a leading veterinary diagnostics company, which has stringent quality control guidelines and well-validated standard operating procedures.
FMT has been used in large-animal veterinary medicine since the 17th century. (In livestock, the practice is often called “transfaunation.”) Since the mid-20th century, FMT’s success in treating C. difficile infections in humans has led to an expansion of this approach into small-animal veterinary medicine, especially as a treatment for chronic diarrhea in cats and dogs.
Many animal studies have shown that FMT can help resolve diarrhea—caused by inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) or parvovirus (parvo), for example—as well as skin issues like atopic dermatitis.
The transfer of fecal material from a healthy person to a sick person to cure disease goes back as far as fourth-century China, and has been performed for hundreds of years throughout Europe. The practice gained momentum in the United States in the 1950s and has become an increasingly widespread treatment method with well-documented success.
Though modern regulatory entities like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are still determining what conditions FMT therapy is approved for, FMT continues to demonstrate promising results for a growing list of human health conditions in experimental trials.