https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/06/03/stroke-survivors-walk-again-after-stanford-injects-stem-cells-in/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_em
Stroke survivors who believed they would be paralysed or need a wheelchair for the rest of their lives are walking and moving again following a ground-breaking stem cell treatment.
18 patients who agreed to allow doctors to drill a hole in their skull and inject stem cells into the damaged part of their brain have made a ‘remarkable’ recovery.
Incredibly, it worked for patients whose strokes had occurred between six months and three years previously. Historically doctors have believed that the brain will no longer regenerate after six months.
But the new therapy essentially turns the adult brain back to an infant brain so that it can rebuild itself.
Scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine believe the therapy could also work for other neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
“The remarkable recovery we saw in many of these chronic stroke patients was quite surprising,” said Prof Gary Steinberg, Chair of Neurosurgery at Stanford, who has spent 15 years researching stem cells.
“This wasn’t just ‘they couldn’t move their thumb and now they can’. Patients who were in wheelchairs are walking now. Their ability to move around has recovered visibly. That’s unprecedented.
“The study changes our prior notion that patients can’t recover much more after the first six months following a stroke because the circuits are dead, or irreversibly damaged.
“Clearly the circuits can be resurrected by this treatment and we are still investigating how they are being jump-started.”
The stem cells in question were taken from the bone marrow of two donors. Scientists had previously believed that stem cells could not integrate into the brain to become neurons. But it now appears they secrete powerful chemicals for growth and regeneration which the brain can use to restore function.
“In a simple sense, the stem cell transplant turns the adult brain in a neonatal of infant brain which recovers well after a stroke or other injury,” added Prof Steinberg.
“This could revolutionise our concept of what happens after no only stroke but traumatic brain injury and ever neurodegenerative disorders. We thought these brain circuits were dead and we’ve learned that they’re not.”
All the patients involved in the trial had suffered ischemic strokes where a clot prevents blood getting to the brain, which leads to brain cell death. The procedure involved drilling a small hole in the skull above the damaged area so that SB623 stem cells could be injected at several spots around the edge of the injury.
The patients, who had an average age of 61, only needed a local anaesthetic and were sent home the following day. Although many complained of initial headaches, because of the surgical procedure, there were no long-term side-effects.
Afterwards they were monitored with blood tests, clinical evaluations and brain imaging. Intriguingly the implanted stem cells do not survive very long in the brain, but recovery continued even after they had vanished.
There was an overall 11.4 point improvement on the Fugl-Meyer test, which gauges how well stoke pateints can move and there has been no relapse since the injection,n which was carried out up to two years ago.
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