Stem cells found to help heart heal after attack

[n2doc]

Bloomberg News
Thursday, February 16, 2012

Stem cells grown from patients' own cardiac tissue can heal damage once thought to be permanent after a heart attack, according to a study that suggests the experimental approach may one day help stave off heart failure.

In a trial of 25 heart attack patients, 17 who got the stem cell treatment showed a 50 percent reduction in cardiac scar tissue compared with no improvement for the eight who received standard care. The results, from the first of three sets of clinical trials generally needed for regulatory approval, were published Tuesday in the medical journal Lancet.

"The findings in this paper are encouraging," said Deepak Srivastava, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco. "There's a dire need for new therapies for people with heart failure. It's still the No. 1 cause of death in men and women."

The study, by researchers from Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, tested the approach in patients who recently suffered a heart attack, with the goal that repairing the damage might help stave off failure.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/15/MNFG1N7GR0.DTL

[cpamomfromtexas]

1. the FDA says your own stem cells are drugs

See the link:

http://www.anh-usa.org/fda-new-claim-body-is-a-drug/

[MineralMan]

2. It's not really that they're a drug.

It's more the technique used to generate and implant them that the FDA is concerned with. Stem cells may well be the key to lots of treatments, but they can also have negative effects, and can, and do, grow into tumors, rather than useful tissue.

So, the FDA is involved, as it is in other areas of medical practice. The process used to create new stem cells from cardiac tissue for re-implantation is something the FDA is involved with. So, the clinical trials are required, and should be required. It's not yet known for certain how this procedure will work out, when it is valuable, and when it should not be used. The process is important in helping determine those things.

I'm hopeful that this and other stem cell technologies will improve people's health and be effective treatments, but I'm far from ready for the medical community to just start using them willy-nilly. Each technology has to be tested carefully before being used widely, I think.

Your link is to an advocacy website which sees the FDA as the Great Satan. Their articles should be looked at with that in mind.