Andrew Moseson experienced severe depression for many years. … He struggled to find relief, nothing worked. … Then, in the spring of 2023, he found a clinical trial that would change his life.
The trial was for people with clinical depression who, like Moseson, had not found success with existing medication. It involved faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), in which stool from a healthy donor is transferred into a recipient’s gastrointestinal tract to restore a healthy balance of gut bacteria.
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“Within about a week, I started feeling better,” he says. “I felt like my brain was refreshed.”
Numerous psychiatric and neurological conditions have been linked to disturbances in people’s gut microbiota — the community of trillions of microorganisms that live symbiotically in the gastrointestinal tract.
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One drawback of FMT is that it does little to narrow down which microbes are responsible for the benefits. Ultimately, more-targeted treatments could be developed, such as probiotics, but transplant trials could show whether this is worth pursuing.
