It shows a survey in 47 countries, which researchers from Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital are behind.
The good news is that Denmark is a leader in Europe – both in terms of treatment and research into the life-threatening intestinal infection clostridium difficile.
It typically affects patients who have previously received severe antibiotic treatment, such as inflammation of the urinary tract or lungs, and thus have their natural intestinal flora shattered.
– We now have stool banks in Aarhus, Odense and Hvidovre, where we collect faeces from healthy donors. It is made into capsules, which by patients today is the preferred way to ingest the intestinal bacteria in relation to binocular examination or probe, says Christian Lodberg Hvas, who has helped build the first Danish faecal bank.
He is chief physician at Liver, Stomach and Intestinal Diseases at Aarhus University Hospital and clinical associate professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University.
The ingestion of someone else’s healthy intestinal bacteria is so effective that the otherwise often terminally ill patient often recovers the very next day.
It has been previously studied that the hospitalization time for the seriously ill intestinal patients can be almost halved. The inmates went from 37 days in the hospital to 20 after a stool operation.
The same is seen when it comes to hospital costs, which on average were halved. They fell per patient on average from 420,000 to 243,000 kroner per year.
Therefore, according to Christian Lodberg Hvas, it is gratifying that in a few years Denmark has moved from 100 to 600 annual fecal transplants. Even though there is still an even greater potential in Denmark.
– We are the ones in Europe who treat most in this way. But it takes a long time to introduce a new treatment by default. We do not have a large pharmaceutical company with a huge marketing budget behind it, which is typically the way to introduce new treatments, he says.
– But now all Danish patients at least have access to the treatment, regardless of where they live in the country.
Fecal transplantation has today been introduced as a routine treatment in the Danish hospital system.
In the autumn of 2018, Christian Lodberg Hvas and colleagues received a grant of DKK 17 million from the Innovation Fund. The money was earmarked for the work of making faeces from healthy, registered and tested donors for standard treatment in the Danish hospitals.
Source: The Nordic Page