In a stem cell usage breakthrough, it has been discovered that an injection of these cloned cells can in fact create new vessels in a diseased heart muscle, improving blood flow to the area and diminish chest pains. The new science could offer hope to many of the 850,000 Americans whose chest pain doesn’t subside even with medicine, angioplasty or surgery.
Patients who received the new treatment reported half as many chest pain episodes and improved exercise capability compared to those who received a placebo.
Douglas W. Losordo, M.D., lead researcher and professor of medicine and director of the Feinberg Cardiovascular Research Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago stated:
“One exciting potential of this procedure is that it will offer these folks an opportunity to get part of their lives back. The net difference in exercise tolerance is highly clinically significant, particularly in a patient population that is severely limited by symptoms. It translates as going from being able to watch television to being able to walk at a normal pace or going from being able to walk slowly to being able to ride a bike.”
Researchers used the patients’ CD34+ stem cells, which circulate through the blood and are important in forming new blood vessels. The stem cell injection is meant to create new vessels in the diseased heart muscle, improving blood flow to the area and reducing episodes of chest pain.
In the study, 167 patients at 26 U.S. medical centers were randomized to one of three injection groups: low dose (100,000 CD34+ cells/kg body weight); high dose (500,000 CD34+ cells/kg body weight); or a placebo. Normally, there are too few CD34+ cells to provide enough for therapy. So, researchers used a drug to increase the number of the cells in the body before collecting them. Using a catheter threaded into the heart, the researchers injected CD34+ cells into muscle identified as receiving insufficient blood.
At six months, low-dose patients had 6.8 angina attacks per week, which was significantly fewer than 10.9 per week for those receiving placebo. High-dose patients had fewer episodes than the placebo group, but the difference was not statistically significant, so the results could be due to chance.
At 12 months, the low-dose group had 6.3 episodes per week and the placebo patients had 11 episodes per week; high-dose patients had fewer angina episodes than the control group, but the difference remained insignificant however.
The improvement in exercise tolerance at six months in low-dose patients was 139 seconds, which was considerably greater compared to the 69-second tolerance of the placebo patients. The high-dose group had a greater, but not significant, improvement than the placebo patients.
About a third of participants had minor elevations of troponin, an enzyme that signals a heart attack when accompanied by changes in an electrocardiogram (EKG), researchers said. However, patients felt no chest pain and experienced no EKG changes.
Source:
Written by Sy Kraft