A recent Massachusetts General study has found a way to successfully use frozen fecal material to treat a serious infection, Clostridium difficile (C. difficile). The pilot study may lead to more widespread availability and acceptance of this type of treatment.

The transplant material comes from healthy donors and is used to treat the serious and often recurrent diarrhea caused by the C. difficile bacteria.

The researchers reported in a paper that is being published online in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases that the use of prescreened frozen fecal matter from healthy donors, who had no relation to the patients in the study, successfully treated the recurrent infection. Previously, the use of fresh material also successfully treated the recurrent infection, in what is referred to as Fecal Microbiota Transplant (FMT).

Senior report author Elizabeth Hohmann, MD, of the MGH Infectious Diseases Division, said in a statement, “We found that delivery of a frozen, stored inoculum through a nasogastric tube is safe, acceptable to patients and as successful as delivery by colonoscopy – which requires a preparatory ‘clean out,’ sedation or anesthesia, and is quite costly.” She continues, “Without this treatment option, patients with recurrent C. difficile may have chronic diarrhea – limiting their quality of life and their ability to maintain weight – and need to live on chronic antibiotic treatment, which is both expensive and can have other side effects.”

The infection is a growing concern, and is responsible for roughly 250,000 infections requiring hospitalization and 14,000 deaths every year throughout the country. According to Hohmann, two to five patients test positive for the bacterial infection each day at MGH.

For patients whose infection is recurrent or does not respond well to long-term treatment with antibiotics such as vancomycin, symptoms recur approximately 30 percent of the time. Some antibiotics kill off the healthy microorganisms in the gut that keep harmful bacteria such as C. difficile from causing problems.