Hacker News Reader

Comment by hbcondo714 | Hacker News Reader

I would recommend the site https://gutbrainaxistherapeutics.com for learning more about Microbiota Transplant Therapy (MTT) and its opportunities, especially for Autism and Pitt-Hopkins Syndrome.

View on HN

I’ll dig in more but my first question when I see this: who are the donors exactly? Like who decides what the ideal gut microbiome is and that John Doe is the guy to provide his fecal matter to the masses?

You either need a lab to test donor samples first, or when this was more of a craze, a popular source of 'donations' for the DIY crowd was young children.

If you're interested in digging into the people that were doing this, they had a website dedicated to everyone telling their stories of how they went about their own individual journeys.

The website was called thepowerofpoop.com and looks like it's gone now, but is available on the wayback machine including individual articles and images.

I would go back to at least 2022 .. I think they possibly got in legal trouble at some point and started taking things down.

More importantly: are there places that will pay me to make regular donations?

Fecal transplants...people will do anything to avoid eating a balanced, largely/wholly plant-based diet with a wide variety of fruits and vegetables.

I think the idea is that the biome is built up over time and you can't always just eat your way to certain bacteria growing in your gut.

I think the fecal transplants help to essentially seed your gut with healthy bacteria, which makes adapting to the proper diet easier when your body isn't constantly fighting you.

It's not that simple.

The last couple years, a buddy of mine did exactly what you proposed: He had massive GI problems, so he started watching what he ate, and… his problems became much worse.

Fast forward to a couple months ago, when he sees a doctor specializing in this stuff and she tells him to significantly reduce plant-based food for a while "because your gut biome isn't able to handle it right now. You should go eat a burger every now and then." So he's been following her advice and all of sudden he is without any GI issues whatsoever.

My buddy got lucky (found the right doctor, could eat his way out of it) but if your gut biome is seriously out of whack, I can definitely see the appeal of an FMT to kickstart your recovery.

I would not recommend that site as a good resource.

Microbiome transplant therapy is a domain full of grifters right now who will push it to vulnerable populations desperate for hope, like parents of autistic children. The real research results are much less promising for difficult conditions.

There is zero evidence that poop transplants have any effect on autism, let's be clear here.

Not true; their clinical trials[1] finds Improvements in GI symptoms, ASD symptoms, and the microbiome all persisted for at least 8 weeks after treatment ended, suggesting a long-term impact[2]

More recently, a study finds The modulation of the gut microbiota using MTT in ASD has shown beneficial and long-term effects on GI symptoms and core symptoms of autism[3]

[1] https://gutbrainaxistherapeutics.com/pipeline/#clinical-tria...

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40168-016-0225-7

[3] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19490976.2025.24...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com