Study shows reduction in brain injury after stroke patients were treated with their own stem cells

Why bone marrow?  Urine would be much faster and definitely more interesting.

Turning urine into brain cells could help fight Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s

December 2012

The most important thing from this seems to be the ability to know what damage was objectively determined in your white matter. That knowledge could then be used to determine objectively what interventions of axon pathfinding and dendritic branching work. Thus being able to create protocols. This is so fucking obvious that stroke leaders should add it to the stroke strategy and thus create research to solve the pathfinding and branching needs.

Study shows reduction in brain injury after stroke patients were treated with their own stem cells

March 12, 2021 / Yimy Villa

Illustration showing the mechanism of an ischemic stroke. In an ischemic stroke, blood supply to part of the brain is decreased, leading to dysfunction of that area of the brain. Here, a blood clot is the reason for restricted blood flow.

Stroke is the third leading cause of death and serious long-term disability and affects nearly 800,000 Americans a year, with someone in the U.S. suffering a stroke every 40 seconds. Roughly 87% of all strokes are ischemic strokes, meaning that a clot blocks blood flow to the brain. Unfortunately 90% of those who suffer an ischemic stroke also end up suffering from weakness or paralysis to one side of the body.

A study conducted by Muhammad Haque, Ph.D. and Sean Savitz, M.D. at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) found that treating patients with stem cells from their own bone marrow could lead to a reduction in brain injury after a stroke caused by a blood clot.

For this study, there were 37 patients from ages 18 to 80. While all received the standard stroke treatment and rehabilitation follow-up, 17 patients whose strokes were the most severe received a bone marrow stem cell therapy. To measure any improvement, the UTHealth team used 3D brain imaging of the patients obtained from MRI scans. They used these images to compare changes in white matter of those treated with their own bone marrow stem cells to those who were not treated.

White matter is a specific type of tissue in the brain that is critical for motor function because it is responsible for carrying movement-related information to the spinal cord.

Three months after the stroke, the MRI scans of each patient showed the expected decrease after a stroke. However, scans taken 12 months after the stroke occurred showed an improvement on average in the 17 patients who received bone marrow cell therapy.

In a press release from UTHealth, Dr. Haque elaborates on what these results could mean for developing treamtents for stroke patients.

“We envision that future clinical trials might be directed toward identifying white matter protection or repair as an important mechanistic target of efficacy studies and potency assays for bone marrow cell therapies.”

The full results to this study were published in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine.