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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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New
Source of Cells For Treating Heart Disease! Human stem cells can be very useful in research and clinic. While they can be used to test new drug, their most important contributions would be in cell-based therapies because of their potential of becoming any cell in the body. The most common types of stem cells used by scientists are embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. When a stem cell divides, each new cell has the potential of remaining a stem cell or becoming another type of cell with a more specialized function, such as a muscle cell, a red blood cell, or a brain cell. Such ability could help replace damaged or diseased cells, tissues and even organs. Scientists believe they could eventually use stem cells to treat diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, burns, diabetes, heart disease, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, spinal cord injury and stroke. Though numerous uses of stem cells have been developed, deriving them might not be as easy as what people think. For example, using embryonic stem cells involves destroying a viable embryo that poses ethical issues while using adult stem cells requiring painful and invasive procedures as it is derived from organs like bone marrow. In 2008, scientists from Keio University’s school of medicine, National Research Institute for Child Health and Development in Tokyo, Tokyo Women's Medical University, and Kanazawa University discovered that menstrual blood from women could be used to repair damaged heart. The precursor cells they found in menstrual blood can be used to develop cardiac stem-cell therapeutic material. Their findings were published in the online edition of the United States Journal Stem Cell.
After harvesting the precursor cells, known as mesenchymal cells (MMCs), from 9 female volunteers’ menstrual blood, they cultivated the cells for about a month. They found that some 20 percent of the MMCs started beating spontaneously about 3 days after being put together in vitro with cells from the hearts of rats. MMCs finally formed sheet-like heart-muscle tissue. Success rate was 100 times higher than the 0.2 to 0.3 percent from stem cells taken from human bone marrow. Results from a separate in-vivo experiments also showed that the condition of rats, which had suffered heart attack, improved after they received MMCs. According to the researchers, the age of donor women did not seem to influence the capability of MMCs. They believed that there might be a system available in the near future that allows women with heart disease to be able to use their own menstrual blood for their own treatment. The prime benefit of using own blood could prevent one’s immune system from rejecting the cells. Furthermore, MMCs can be stored for a long time in a finger-size tube and cultivated as and when necessary. Under proper storage condition, a tremendous count of cells could be stored in a small space for very long time. As claimed by the researchers, if these cells were not used for 100 years, they could even stay there for 200 or 300 years waiting for a perfect match. Strictly speaking, MMCs cannot be called stem cells. Nevertheless, they too have the high potential to develop into muscle cells. This suggests that the blood could in time be employed to treat muscular dystrophy. While the rats being studied showed improvement in their hearts, including increased power of contraction, the researchers was not completely happy with the results. They insisted that their experiment is not ready for clinical use yet, definitely not before they could find out how exactly MMCs could be converted into heart cells.
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