Stem Cell Injection

[magicsiew]

I have an uncle who recently attacked by stroke. There is a professor asking him to take stem cell injection as a treatment. Is it an effective method to aid the recovery process? By the way, my uncle now is still half body paralyze.

[Darby]

This is experimental, right-? There's not a lot of clinical evidence that this will help, and there is the possibility that when the cells differentiate, the rejection could get very nasty.

[biohazard]

It would be interesting to know what exactly the doctor hopes the stem cells in question would do.

Stem cell injection is routine business in the treatment of certain heamatological malignancies, fo example, so some knowledge already exists. Rejection is not a problem if the stem cells are of autologous origin, but in the case of stroke I don't quite understand how the stem cells are expected to work.

Progenitors for new neurons maybe..? Do you know what is the origin of the stem cells, and have they perhaps been manipulated in some way?

[JackBean]

I think, they should replace damaged myoblasts, shouldn't they?

[biohazard]

I think in this case (as this is about a stroke) the damage is in the brain, in the neurons. Half-body paralysis (or half-face in milder cases) is a typical symptom of ischemia caused by brain hemorrhage or embolism, which leaves the affected neurons without oxygen and kills or damages them. Thus, I believe it is stem cells for neurons what they try to inject. But I have only heard of some limited success in peripheral nerve stem cell therapy, I wasn't aware they (try to) do it for the brain as well.

[JackBean]

sorry, these terms always interferes to me.

To my knowledge, they tried stem cells to cure Huntington and maybe also Alzheimers diseases and that would require the implantation into brain, right?

[magicsiew]

Darby: It is not an experiment, and the professor is from China, I don't know how they get approached by him. What I know is there is no such treatment in Malaysia. (where my uncle live)

BIohazard: we don't know where the stem cell coming from, but definitely not origin from the patient himself. It was pre-prepared and need to take the injection for 3 months, with each week few injection ( I forgotten the detail).

[IreneN]

Stem cells are already used with success as part of the treatment various severe diseases - http://www.childwiki.com/index.php/Stem_cell

[Darby]

This sounds a bit like what was attempted years ago in Mexico as a treatment for Parkinson's - they got pretty good results, up until the time that the patients all died, probably from a rejection of the tissue.

Stem cells have few cell markers and are not recognized as foreign tissue, but once they become mature functioning cells, they express the donor's markers and generally get rejected. It's one of the major (but rarely talked-about) obstacles, and why a lot of research is going into developing self-generated stem cells.