How Could Stem Cells Help People With Parkinson’s
Stem cells are the parent cells of all tissues in the body. This means they can turn into any type of cell. The hope is that they will eventually be able to make these cells into specific types of cells, like dopamine-producing neurons, that can be used to treat Parkinson’s disease. However, there are concerns that patients may have the same risk of increased involuntary movements as those who undergo fetal cell transplantation. And, like fetal cell transplantation, stem cell therapy is surrounded by moral and ethical controversy.
Pd As A Candidate For Stem Cell Therapy
Neurodegeneration broadly involves the progressive loss of neurons in the nervous system. Recent evidence show that neurons begin losing their normal functions and morphologies even before neuronal death, suggesting that simply preventing these neurons from dying is unlikely to be an effective therapeutic approach . As such, unless there are therapeutic strategies that preserve the structure and function of neurons, cell transplantation still appears to be the most effective approach. However, without a deep understanding of the biology of the diseases and pathological mechanisms, cell replacement therapy is still very much an empirical trial-and-error approach. For instance, cell transplantation is likely to be more successful for PD than for a neurodegegenrative disease that simultaneously affects multiple regions in the brain. In PD, dopaminergic neurons in a specific anatomical region, known as the substantia nigra pars compacta , are lost. Along the nigrostriatal pathway, SNpc dopaminergic neurons innervate the dorsal striatum where they release the neurotransmitter dopamine. Loss of dopaminergic neurons in the SNpc is one of the main pathological feature in PD, and is responsible for the symptomatic motor deficits of PD.
Is There Any Guarantee That A Stem Cell
There is no therapy, be it an experimental or established treatment, for which your treating physician can promise or even guarantee a therapeutic success. In the case of innovative and experimental therapies such as stem cell therapy, doctors must perform a benefit-to-risk-analysis for each individual case and ensure that the therapy is beneficial to the patient and these benefits outweigh the risks. Only when this is the case, your doctor will suggest treatment with stem cells.
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Where Do Stem Cells Come From
Various types of stem cells are found at different stages of human development and in different parts of the body, all of which are of interest to researchers.
Embryonic stem cells: these stem cells are found in fertilised eggs that are only a few days old. These are the only cells that can develop into any type of cell within the body. The abundance of stem cells decreases as the embryo grows and stem cells become specialised cell types that form parts of our body.
Whilst embryonic stem cells are very promising as a treatment for Parkinsons, they also have the risk of uncontrolled growth in the body which could lead to the formation of tumours. Much more research is needed in order for scientists to understand how stem cells work and how they may be used to produce treatments for Parkinsons and many other medical conditions.
Adult stem cells: although adult stem cells exist, they are found in quite small numbers in certain parts of the body and do not multiply quickly. Adult stem cells have been used to treat some conditions for example bone marrow transplants to treat leukaemia. However, it is not currently possible to change adult stem cells into nerve cells suitable as a treatment for Parkinsons.
Bone marrow: these stem cells are found in our bone marrow and bones.
People Should Not Be Selling Stem Cells For Parkinsons Disease
Did you notice the common thread among the studies I covered? Every single one of them used brain surgery to place the cells. Right now, thats the only surefire way to get stem cells to the tissue affected by Parkinsons Disease.
So if you happen to search for a PD treatment and find someone offering stem cells for it, I hope youll first check to see if theyre a neurosurgeon. Specifically one specializing in stereotactic brain surgery .
If a chiropractor, pain management doctor, orthopedic surgeon, witch doctor, naturopath, shaman, priest, or alien offers you a stem cell treatment for PD, please dont mortgage your house for it. Please dont use your kids college tuition for it.
Please ask a thousand questions, the most important of which are: how will this get to my PD cells? How many times have you done this before, and what were the results? Is this part of a clinical study? How do you know this is safe?
If someone offers you or a loved one a stem cell treatment for PD outside of a clinical trial or study, without the help of a neurosurgeon, you should not expect success. Or safety.
In case theres any lingering doubt, my personal favorite PD treatment is the electrical spaghetti noodle implant. They do amazing things and have a long history of safe and effective use.
Im excited to see stem cells come onto the PD field in the near future. I really am. But I know they arent ready for general clinical use in Parkinsons Disease just yet.
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So What Are Stem Cells
Stem cells are cells that have not yet specialized in the body, meaning they have not grown to a particular type of cell with a specific function . A stem cell can become many different cell types in the human body. The process of stem cells become new types of cells is called differentiation. This process is the most important aspect of stem cell therapies, as the cells become the type of cells required for your body to heal. Stem cells are also self-replicating. This allows them to multiply into identical copies of the stem cells that have already gone through differentiation in the body. For example, if stem cells were used to treat a neurological injury, cells administered during treatment could become nerve cells, and then replicate to create exponentially more nerve cells on their own. This drastically increases the effectiveness of stem cell treatments over time.
How Can Stem Cells Help With Parkinsons
Stem cells are unique in the sense that they can take on so many different roles. When it comes to neurological conditions like Parkinsons, stem cells can help to slow the progress of the disease or stop it altogether.
Parkinsons symptoms are caused largely by a lack of dopamine or damaged dopamine neurons. The idea is that stem cells can be introduced into the host where they can then begin to produce dopamine and replace the missing dopaminergic cells.
This is a process known as neurogenesis: the creation of new brain cells and synapses.
There are lots of different types of stem cells that can be used in stem cell therapy: embryonic, blood, bone, skin, and so on. Scientists are still working to discover which type of stem cells are most effective for treating the symptoms of Parkinsons disease.
The goal is to identify the most effective cell or selection of cells to regenerate damaged or defunct brain tissue. By doing this the brain can return to an optimum level of dopamine production. This would provide a more long-term solution than simply using drugs to cover up the symptoms.
Restoring the brain to a healthy level of dopamine production would lead to an improvement in the majority of Parkinsons symptoms, but not all of them. Dopaminergic symptoms are those related to motor functions and include tics, slow motions, uncoordinated movements, as well as insomnia, and fatigue. Other symptoms like constipation and memory loss may not be influenced by dopamine.
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Mda Cell Dosage For Transplantation
Typically, 200,000420,000 dopamine neurons reside in human midbrain, and it is estimated that 50% loss of those DA neurons leads to the PD symptom . According to preclinical studies using fetal tissue or hPSC-derived mDA cell, 12002400 surviving TH + neurons in rat, 13,000 in primate, 40,00080,000 in the human brain may be required to achieve a meaningful therapeutic effect . The current bottleneck in delivering cells to the brain is that typically less than 10% of grafted mDA neurons survive following transplantation . Multiple factor may contribute to poor mDA neuron survival including mechanical trauma, growth factor deprivation, initial lack of vascularization, hypoxia and free radical production, or excessive extracellular concentrations of excitatory amino acids in the host brain .
What Is The Cost Of Stem Cell Treatments For Parkinsons Disease
The cost of the initial treatment ranges from $5,000 to $10,000. The range in cost is dependent on the complexity of delivering the cells back to you. For example, some Parkinsons Disease patients desire stem cells directly into the fluid surrounding their brain and spinal cord referred to as the cerebrospinal fluid . When this occurs, special imaging and an additional specialist are necessary. For many people the initial treatment is all that is needed however, for some conditions, subsequent treatments may be required and these are done at a reduced fee.
Innovations Medical provides Stem Cell Therapy procedures at both our Dallas and Fort Worth practice locations. Learn more about the benefits of fat stem cell therapy for Parkinsons disease and other neurological conditions by calling for more information or to schedule a consultation.
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A Stroll To Times Square
Lopez had barely settled back into his hospital bed after the four-hour operation when he felt his muscles strengthening and the tremors dissipating. He threatened to arm-wrestle the surgeon who came to check on him. And he told his personal assistant that he wanted to get the heck out of the hospital and take a walk. I said, this is what it feels like to be normal, Lopez recalled.
Lopez, his son, and the assistant walked the 2 miles to Times Square under a nearly cloudless sky, in a balmy 70 degrees with only a light wind fluttering the awnings along Broadway. Lopez had had his new dopamine-producing neurons only a few hours, but it already felt like Lourdes had slipped through a wormhole in the space-time continuum and landed in Manhattan.
It was the sort of description that made his physicians squirm. As Lopez and his doctors recounted the saga a year later, Carter brought the discussion crashing back down to reality. He didnt dispute that Lopez felt and moved much better in the immediate aftermath of the cell implants. But that did not mean they worked.
Weve seen this sort of immediate I feel better before, said Carter, who is now chief of neurosurgery at Mass. General. It takes much longer, on the order of months, for dopamine-neuron progenitor cells like those Lopez received to form synapses with existing neurons and thereby start to restore lost motor functions.
What Is Cellular Regeneration Therapy
The discovery of stem cells is one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the last decades. The opportunities it offers for treating several chronic diseases have opened a whole new medical field: Regenerative Medicine.
Regenerative medicine targets chronic diseases characterized by cellular degeneration or cell death , which were once considered incurable
These stem cells may be obtained from the same person or from a different person . In this patient´s specific case, stem cells were extracted from the patientâs bone marrow.
The benefits of using autologous SC include reduction in the risk of direct adverse effects that occur with other types of stem cell treatment, and zero possibility of causing cancer, a risk seen with embryonic stem cells.
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It Started As A Weird Idea But A New Study Shows The Appendix Can Initiate Parkinsons
Kim knew it would take tens of millions of dopamine neurons to have a prayer of helping a Parkinsons patient. The recipe for turning undifferentiated iPS cells into dopamine neurons wasnt perfect, however, which presented a problem: The remaining iPS cells can seed tumors.
Even after two or three weeks of differentiation, there can remain undifferentiated cells, Kim said. If he turned 99.9% of iPS cells into dopamine neurons, that would leave 10,000 iPS cells. Hitting 99.99% would leave 1,000. How efficient was efficient enough? We realized we needed to remove all of them, Kim said.
That meant looking for a killer. Kim and colleagues in South Korea pored over a database of compounds, searching for any that target a gene called survivin, which is abundant in iPS cells. They got a hit: quercetin. Testing the Chinese herbal compound on his iPS cells, Kim found, if you treat the cells once, for 12 hours, while theyre differentiating, quercetin completely removes the undifferentiated cells.
It was time to start thinking about putting the cells in someones brain.
Stem Cell Therapy For Memory Loss
The Regen Center Ncell therapy allows us targeted and customizable cell delivery to help induce neurogenesis over several stages, depending on the severity of the patients underlying health. The treatments are effective in being absorbed by the tissues after crossing the brain barrier through the use of cerebrospinal fluid or nebulizer.
Treatments options for PD using Stem cells may include:
- Radio Guided Therapy
- The stereotactic technique of deep brain stimulation
- Striatum stereotactic pallidotomy
- Subarachnoid stem cell implantation via lumbar puncture
- Brain stereotactic operation
Implanted neural stem cells help dopamine transport channels and eventually differentiate into dopaminergic neuron cells to continue as healthy & functional neurotransmitters. Mesenchymal stem cells that we use for treatment MSC+ Mesenchymal cells that are differentiated into nerve cells, including dopamine-producing cells. The quantity & types of implanted cells dependent strictly on the patients medical needs.
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Etiology And Risk Factors
Parkinsonian symptoms can arise from either the neuropathologic condition of PD or other forms of parkinsonism. For neuropathologic PD, about 90% of cases are sporadic, with no clear etiology an additional 10% have a genetic origin, and at least 11 different linkages with 6 gene mutations have been identified Genetic forms of PD are seen more frequently in young-onset PD. A combination of environmental factors or toxins, genetic susceptibility, and the aging process may account for many sporadic cases Secondary forms of parkinsonism can be caused by medications, the sequelae of central nervous system infection, toxins, or vascular/metabolic disorders . The only proven risk factor for PD is advancing age . Other environmental or lifestyle risk factors associated with development of PD are rural living, exposure to pesticides and herbicides, well-water drinking, and working with solvents . However, none of these factors unequivocally has been demonstrated to cause iPD .
Figure 1: Etiology of Parkinson’s Disease . View Figure 1
Stem Cell Treatment For Parkinsons 2022 Protocol
In Parkinsons disease, specific nerve cells die in the brain. Doctors worldwide are therefore to find a way to replace these dead neural stem cells with new functional cells and neurotransmitters. One idea was to take stem cells from the bone marrow and implant them in the brain . According to the theory, the stem cells in the mind of the patient
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Red Flags Raising Concerns About A Medical Tourism Facility
Claims of efficacy only based on patient testimonialsClaims of multiple diseases being treated with the same type of stem cellUnclear documentation of the source of the cells or how the treatment will be doneClaims of little or no riskHigh cost of treatment or hidden costsSuggestions that repeat treatments may be needed if not initially successful
Stem Cell Treatments In The Future Of Parkinsons Disease Management
Although there are a number of challenges brought about with stem cell-based treatments for PD, it seems probable that these treatments will progress to the clinic in the short- to medium-term future. While development of optimized products has been necessarily slow and iterative, the field is now asking questions about how these treatments can be scaled and deliveredthis demonstrates the progress that has been made with these approaches.
As has been discussed, the purpose of stem cell treatments is predominantly to treat the motor symptoms of PD. They will not have any disease-modifying effect and will not treat the major non-motor symptoms which can be particularly disabling in some patients. While these techniques can form one arm of the future of PD treatment, they will likely be combined with other novel treatments targeting alpha-synuclein pathology . It may be possible for stem cell-based regenerative therapies to be employed to restore the function of dopaminergic neurons that have already been lost, while novel disease-modifying drugs could be used to prevent ongoing neuronal death.
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What Is Parkinsons Disease
Parkinsons disease begins in a part of the brain called the substantia nigra. Many of the cells in this area produce the dopamine needed to send signals in the brain that trigger movement. When these cells begin to die off due to the disease, the body cant move as effectively. Eventually, the body loses almost all motor function as well as the ability to carry out other bodily processes.
The good news is that researchers have found several potential paths to Parkinsons treatment that may enable them to slow down or halt the loss of dopamine-producing cells. Eventually, with regenerative medicine, they may be able to replace those cells. Ultimately, that would manifest as the cure for which Parkinsons patients and their loved ones have prayed for since the diseases discovery. But first, how exactly does stem cell therapy work?
Results Of Swiss Medica Patients
Carlo G., patient from Italy :
I was at all the best clinics, but none of them gave me the results like the ones I got after only 3 days in Swiss Medica clinic.
Franchesco, patient from Italy:
I can talk faster, write, walk in the mountains, wash by myself and play football with my grandchildren.
Patient from Denmark, 10 years with Parkinsons disease:
Each tiny thing matters. His illness started with a little finger trembling and progressed to complete inability to perform daily activities. Now he feels that the progression of the disease has stopped. He can hold a glass and drink, lift his legs, clap his hands and touch his head with his arm.
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