By Matthew Halliday
Published August 9, 2018
Every year, more than 400,000 Canadians experience symptoms consistent with bipolar disorder — extreme mood swings whip-sawing between mania and debilitating depression. It’s a particular cruelty of the condition that while some find relief with medication, others experience side effects that seem, in some cases, almost as devastating as the disease.
“For many people, existing medications don’t work at all, or produce intolerable side effects,” says Dr. Valerie Taylor, chief of psychiatry at Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital (WCH). Some bipolar patients, she explains, feel as if they’re being asked to choose between two chronic diseases — their disorder, or the life-altering side effects of their medication, which can include increased risk of diabetes, weight gain, insomnia, cardiac irregularities, and many more.
For those patients, anything that offers the prospect of relief is worth a shot, no matter how out-there or experimental the treatment may be. To that end, Taylor is right now in the midst of a first-in-the-world clinical trial to investigate the effect of an improbable-seeming treatment on patients living with bipolar disorder: fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) — in plain language, a feces transplant. The trial is premised on the idea that what’s happening in your gut has an intimate and very direct connection to what’s happening in your head. If you’re finding it hard to imagine how and why that might work, you’re not alone.
“It seems off the wall to some doctors,” says Taylor, “but it doesn’t seem off the wall to patients….I’ve never recruited patients as quickly for a trial in my life.”
