By Doug Hornig
caseyresearch.com
The first set of findings, from a team at the University of Louisville headed by Dr. Robert Bolli, was published in The Lancet. It showed that stem-cell therapies were able to reverse heart damage, without dangerous side effects. Basically, what has been revealed is that the human heart contains the seeds of its own rebirth.
The problem has been tapping into this potential. Traditional wisdom holds that massive damage is irreversible – heart cells once destroyed are gone forever – even though it's been recognized that there are stem cells available that can develop into either heart muscle or blood vessel components. But there simply haven't been enough of them present in the body to make much of a difference.
In the Louisville trials, a cohort of 16 patients with severe heart failure was treated by the extraction of stem cells from their own hearts, culturing and purification of the cells in the lab, and then reinjection of millions of the new cells back into the patients' hearts. The outcome was stunning. CNN reports:
Within a year, their heart function markedly improved. The heart's pumping ability can be quantified through the "Left Ventricle Ejection Fraction," a measure of how much blood the heart pumps with each contraction. A patient with an LVEF of less than 40% is considered to suffer severe heart failure. When the study began, Bolli's patients had an average LVEF of 30.3%. Four months after receiving the stem cells, it was 38.5%. Among seven patients who were followed for a full year, it improved to an astounding 42.5%. A control group of seven patients, given nothing but standard maintenance medications, showed no improvement at all.
Of one of his patients, Bolli says that prior to the procedure, the man couldn't walk to the restroom without stopping for breath. Now, two years later, "he can drive a tractor on his farm, even play basketball with his grandchildren. His life was transformed."
Bolli doesn't shy from hyperbole about what this means. "I believe this will be one of the biggest advances in cardiovascular medicine in my lifetime. If not the biggest," he says. "We would possibly be curing heart failure. It would be a revolution."
Coincidentally, at the same time as Bolli's work was being published, yet another study with promising results from a very similar procedure was released. This one came from Los Angeles, where a team headed by Dr. Eduardo Marban, director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, has developed its own stem-cell procedure and applied it very effectively.
Marban's work doesn't involve the purification procedure followed at Louisville. Instead, there is a reintroduction of a mixture of stem cells and other types of cells extracted from the patient's heart. Seventeen patients at Cedars-Sinai were treated in this way, approximately six weeks after suffering a moderate to major heart attack. All had lost enough tissue, Marban says, to put them "at big risk" of future heart failure.
Again, the results were striking. Heart scar tissue was reduced by between 30-47% among the test subjects. Furthermore, whereas a major heart attack is likely to kill off a billion cells, the stem cell recipients regrew an average of about 600 million.
Admittedly, the two populations of 16 and 17 patients are small. Much larger-scale testing remains to be done. But without question, the promise is there. We may well be on the verge of gaining the ability to permanently reverse the effects of heart failure. |
