After a healthy person rinses out snot from his sinuses with saline, the solution is then sprayed into the nose of the sick patient. The healthy bacterial culture that is then present in the solution should affect the diseased sinuses in a positive way and relieve the patient's discomfort.
In the clip, you see svt's reporter acting as a donor and rinsing his sinuses.
"We gathered 22 patients who had healthy snot transplanted from their respective or others who wanted to volunteer. But most chose to take transplants from relatives," says Anders Mårtensson, chief physician at the ear, nose and throat clinic at Helsingborg Hospital and doctoral student at Lund University.
The world-unique study has been conducted in collaboration between Lund University and Helsingborg Hospital, and 70 percent of the participants have shown reduced symptoms after three months.
Future treatment
The treatment method is considerably cheaper than, for example, operating, but it still requires more extensive studies to become part of Swedish healthcare.
–Hopefully, further studies can lead to this method becoming a treatment in the future. Right now, it has only been available to those who participated in the study, so at present it is not something we can offer as a treatment, he says.
The patients who participated in the studies have often suffered from chronic sinusitis for a long time and have before the study undergone extensive care treatments for their problems.