From gut to gut

It is known that some dogs with chronic gut inflammations like Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) respond to treatments that "modify" the gut flora (the community of microorganisms living in the gut), like for example antibiotics or probiotics (friendly gut bacteria). Not only does the DIGEST clinic offer a special probiotic cocktail as a treatment option for IBD in dogs if they don’t respond to diet changes alone, but for cases that are very difficult to control even with strong immunosuppressive drugs we offer a procedure called faecal microbial transplantation (FMT). You can find more about this study in the information leaflet here, but briefly this involves giving the dog an enema of "good" poo bacteria from a healthy donor dog. This is usually done awake or with a mild sedation and can be performed on an outpatient basis. This procedure is not established as a common treatment of IBD in dogs (or cats), but has been used successfully to treat severe gut infections in humans for years and been anecdotally used in dogs and cats.

If your dog is eligible for this study and will or has received this FMT treatment, we would be grateful if you could provide us with poo samples at specific time points after the procedure (we will tell you exactly at what dates during your consultation with us) and keep a diary on how your dog is doing. We will use these poo samples to analyse the gut flora composition before and after to better understand why this has a positive effect.

This project has been approved by the R(D)SVS ethics and welfare committee with the approval number VERC 117.16. This study is supported by funding from the Fiona and Ian Russell fund.