(DIY) FMT for Anti-Aging & Biohacking
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The FMT papers you listed have serious issues.
Let's start with Regular fecal microbiota transplantation to Senescence Accelerated Mouse-Prone 8 (SAMP8) mice delayed the aging of locomotor and exploration ability by rejuvenating the gut microbiota. I don't know how this passed peer review. The English is borderline unintelligible. Maybe it's because the editor was Dutch, which is basically mangled English? Chinese academia generally divides papers into two categories: busy work for meeting publication requirements and actual attempts at scientific advancement. You can generally tell if a paper is one of the former if minimal effort is made at making the English understandable, which is the case here. On the plus side, it points out a major issue with the other listed studies: they all use mice that were chronically treated with antibiotics. It claims to not do this. However, they used aging-accelerated mice. I'm guess they didn't want to spend too much time on the experiements?
They did 48 comparison for mobility. No correction for multiplicity, of course. This is sketchy. This is what you would do if you were intentionally trying to p-hack your way to a cool-sounding paper without even trying to hide it.
The other two, as mentioned, both use mice chronically administered antibiotics, explicitly to increase effect size. I'm... not enthused about this. Lab mice already live in immunologically very weird conditions. Fecal microbiota transfer between young and aged mice reverses hallmarks of the aging gut, eye, and brain [I goofed, it was actually the SAMP8 paper] even had the mice raised individually to prevent the natural exchange of gut microbiota! Mice normally engage in mutual coprophagy, so FMTs are actually something they do naturally (weirdly enough, these studies tend to show that younger mice with FMTs from older mice tend to have worse health outcomes).
I honestly don't feel comfortable extending any of these findings to humans, since the conditions are so different. Bathrooms, especially public bathrooms where almost no one flush with the toilet lid down, are filled with aerosolized fecal particles. I was unable to find any studies on the transmission of fecal bacteria via aerosols, but I suspect we're already microdosing FMTs every time we enter a bathroom.
That's interesting, the aerosol FMT thing. Can you link to any studies? There is a case I know personally of someone recovering from post-covid smell loss by simply smelling stool from a very healthy donor. I assumed this person probably ingested the stool rather than just smelling it, but never thought about FMT aerosol concept.
This is one of those issues, where it's clear that Aubrey's list is missing elements of aging that do exist.
Is it possible to grow the microbes in a lab, after obtaining them? Then you would not need so many donors.
No. First of all we don't know which microbes and in which quantities we want. We have more or less no clue what constitutes a good microbiome. Bacteriophages also seem to play an important role that we know even less about. That's the beauty of FMT - we don't need to know!
Second, most microbes in the gut are anaerobic and thus cannot be grown easily. There is not a single anaerobic probiotic available at this point. That's why probiotics don't come even close to replacing something like FMT, which is done suh that bacteriophages and anaerobic microbes survive.
The problem of "growing artificial poop in the lab" for e.g. FMT pills, is similarly difficult/impossible at this point like growing ordinary "dirt".
Is there any information on durability of treatment and/or longevity in storage? Is this something you'll need to do for a month every few years, or a one-time thing in your 40s, or some other periodicity?
More importantly, this isn't particularly high-tech, what's the reason it's not common among at least some sub-groups of people who could have socially discovered this anytime since disease pathways have been common knowledge?
Re. your first question: Not really known, but you can make educated guesses after reading Human Microbes FMT wiki.
Second question: There is a pretty active FMT online community. E.g. there are several facebook groups. Ppl have been doing this privately for a while now.
Interesting; I did several Fecal Microbiota Transplants (I'd rather say transfers, as it is not really a transplant) in the past trying to address severe antibiotic damage and one of the first things I noticed was that my skin and face (in my 40s) looked much younger in a matter of days. It was like an instant lifting. These effects faded away in weeks, not sure if totally but it was something unexpected from this procedure. I also noticed some other nice "side effects" related to aging, and some other effects not so nice like skin itching and many skin rashes for days (my doc said it was an immune activation).
I had a similar effect and still have it every time I perform an FMT at home, the next day my skin looks much brighter and I don't know why, there must be some underlying mechanism related to microbes we don't know about that affect blood circulation and skin collagen. I only notice this with certain donors and not with others.
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