Take patient's blood, add oxygen, zap it with light, warm it and put it back, great for heart patients

Main Category: Immune System / Vaccines
Article Date: 30 Jun 2004 - 11:00 PDT

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A new treatment developed by Canadian scientists which involves taking some of a patient's blood, adding oxygen to it, zapping it with ultraviolet light, warming it up and then putting the blood back into the patient, seems to work wonders for people with chronic heart failure.

Not much blood is needed for this procedure, just ten millimetres - less than you could get on a dessert spoon. According to the researchers, the procedure provokes an immune response in the body that halts inflammation. Inflammation is associated with chronic heart failure - this damages the body's main organs over the medium (and long) term.

Debra Isaac, director of heart transplants, Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, Canada, said "Inflammation plays a pretty important role in the development and progression of heart failure. What the immune modulation therapy does is it targets the destructive inflammatory changes by activating the patient's own immune system and increasing anti-inflammatory responses. So we're using the patient's own immune system to counteract the bad effects of heart failure."

A study is taking place in the USA and Canada. It involves 2,000 patients. All the patients have either, chronic or congestive heart failure. The patients will undergo this procedure three times in the first month, and then once a month for a period of 24 months.

Lead researcher in Canada, Jean Rouleau, University of Montreal, said "It is critical that we slow down the inflammatory process that is toxic to the heart. Our hope is this potential treatment can alleviate the serious side-effects of chronic heart failure and treat the long-term damage caused by the disease."