Bad Hearts Healed

Published: September 3, 2003 | 78th good news item since 2003

Four seriously ill cardiac patients didn’t need a heart transplant after being treated with their own stem cells, researchers said yesterday.
The medical miracle, part of so-called “regenerative medicine,” involved the stem cells being extracted from the patients’ own bone marrow and then being used to rebuild tissue.

“This is the first approach where you have an opportunity to actually heal a heart,” said Dr. Michael Rosen of Columbia University, who is heading related research involving pacemaker replacement.

“It’s going to be a very long road, but it is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in my 40 years as a doctor in this field.”

The physician heading the research, Hans Fernando Rocha Dohmann, of Rio de Janeiro, said four of his five patients had such a marked improvement in blood supply after stem-cell treatment that they were removed from the list of those needing a heart transplant.

“This finding has a significant social relevance, since there isn’t a single heart-transplant program anywhere in the world that is able to treat all the patients who need it,” Dohmann told reporters at the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology in Vienna.

The whole area of stem-cell research is highly controversial because the most promising of such cells are taken from embryos, usually obtained from fertility clinics. Embryonic stem cells are capable of turning into nearly 200 different tissue types.

The treatment of Dohmann’s four critically ill heart-failure patients involved taking cells from their bone marrow and injecting them into the heart’s left ventricle, the main pumping chamber.

Heart failure is the inability of damaged heart muscle to pump enough blood around the body.

The exact mechanism of action is not understood, but medics believe stem cells harvested from bone marrow or blood may be able to form new muscle and blood vessels.

Alternatively, they may trigger a chemical reaction that improves the functioning of cells in the locality of the injection.

Published in Science & Technology
See also: