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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Animal Nutrition and Metabolism
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fvets.2025.1505226
This article is part of the Research Topic Advancements in Synthetic Microbiomes for Enhancing Animal Health View all 6 articles
Impact of fecal microbiota transplantation in dogs
Provisionally accepted- 1 Norwegian Private Veterinary Services, PrivateVET Small Animal Clinic, Hammerfest, Norway
- 2 Biocode Microbiota Bank, Hammerfest, Norway
- 3 Department of Clinical Medicine, Research group of Gastroenterology and Nutrition, The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway
- 4 Department of Clinical Medicine, Genomics Support Centre Tromsø (GSCT), The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway
- 5 Department of Paraclinical Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås., Norway
The digestive tract hosts various types and numbers of microorganisms. These microorganisms 'micro-organs' play multiple crucial roles in physiological, immunological and metabolic processes in the body. The 'micro-organ' manipulation and transplantation has lately gained an increasing interest in human medicine with promising clinical outcomes, whereas much less is known in veterinary practice.The goals of this pilot study were to evaluate safety and impact of Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT) on dogs suffering with non-infectious digestive disorders.Animals: Seven client-owned adult dogs with idiopathic persistent diarrhea (>3 weeks) and very poor skin-coat conditions were receiving the intervention (FMT) and evaluated in a private veterinary clinic.Transplants have been taken from healthy donors and were administered rectally to recipients. Objective clinical examinations with analyses of blood and feces samples at day 0 (pre-FMT), day 14 -28 (post-FMT) were performed. Besides the conventional blood hematology and biochemistry analyses, 16S rRNA sequencing analysis were used in fecal samples.No FMT related complications have occurred. Five of seven (71%) patients have improved feces parameters associated with better overall clinical outcome, whereas four of the five (80%) recovered recipients showed molecular correlation with the donor gut microbiota after rectal FMT. There were in-significant changes in conventionally analyzed blood samples.The serum cobalamin levels showed tendency to increase in recovered recipients.Conclusions: FMT was easy to apply with certain health benefits in this study. Our findings reveal the important role of a 're-gained' gut microbiome balance in the overall health of dogs.Further research is needed to identify the dynamics and interplay between the different bacteria phyla that may have impact on stimuli of host immunologic and metabolic responses.
Keywords: intestinal microbiota, Transplantation, dog, FMT, Diarrhea
Received: 02 Oct 2024; Accepted: 03 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Cantas, Goll, Fenton, Paulssen and Sørum. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Leon Cantas, Norwegian Private Veterinary Services, PrivateVET Small Animal Clinic, Hammerfest, Norway
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