Choi, Hyun Ho, Cho, Young-Seok · Clinical endoscopy · 2016 · DOI
This article reviews fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), a treatment where healthy gut bacteria from a donor are transferred into a patient's digestive system to treat disease. The procedure can be done several different ways and has shown promise for treating many conditions, including chronic fatigue syndrome. However, many important questions remain unanswered about who should donate, how to do it safely long-term, and how to regulate it properly.
This review is relevant to ME/CFS because it identifies chronic fatigue syndrome as an emerging indication for FMT based on proposed gut dysbiosis mechanisms. For researchers, it highlights the gap between preliminary interest in FMT for ME/CFS and the need for rigorous clinical trials with standardized protocols. For patients, it provides context about an investigational treatment while emphasizing unresolved safety and efficacy questions.
This review does not prove that FMT is effective for ME/CFS—it only identifies CFS as a proposed application with insufficient evidence. The review does not establish causality between microbiota changes and ME/CFS symptoms, nor does it provide patient outcome data from FMT trials in this population. Being a narrative review rather than a systematic analysis, it cannot quantify the strength of evidence or estimate treatment effect sizes.
About the PEM badge: “PEM required” means post-exertional malaise was an explicit required diagnostic criterion for participant inclusion in this study — not that PEM was studied, observed, or discussed. Studies using criteria that do not require PEM (e.g. Fukuda, Oxford) are tagged “PEM not required”. How the atlas works →
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