Fecal Microbiota Therapy in Steroid Ineligible Alcoholic Hepatitis: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

Alcoholic hepatitis, the most florid form of alcoholic liver disease, has a very high short-term mortality of up to 50% and no specific therapies are available other than steroids. Steroids also only show a limited utility in improving the short-term survival and boast no evidence of any long-term benefits. Additionally, only a small proportion of patients with alcoholic hepatitis are eligible to receive steroids. Thus, a large number of patients are either not eligible or do not respond to steroids and this group outnumbers those who do respond to steroids, leaving us without any specific therapeutic options for a majority of these individuals.Even liver transplantation is not feasible in most cases due to the presence of sepsis or recent alcohol consumption and many ethical and logistic issues are involved despite the documented safety and survival benefits of early liver transplantation in patients with severe alcoholic hepatitis (SAH) not responding to medical management.Therefore, newer, more effective, and nontransplant therapeutic options for managing severe alcoholic hepatitis are needed. Since gut dysbiosis, leaky gut, and products of the gut microbiome reaching the liver are the main culprits in the development of alcoholic hepatitis, targeting qualitative and quantitative changes in the gut microbiome remains an important strategy in developing new therapies for alcoholic hepatitis. Among others, the modulation of gut microbiota by fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) has recently been conceptualized and evaluated as a potential therapeutic strategy in both preclinical and clinical studies.