Spinal cord injury is a global term used to capture damage to the spinal cord resulting from trauma (typically in the form of car accidents, falls, or work-related injuries) or from disease or degenerative conditions.
Worldwide, it is estimated that up to 500,000 people suffer some type of spinal cord injury (SCI), with most resulting from car accidents, falls, or violence. The World Health Organization reports that people suffering from SCI are between two and five times more likely to die prematurely as a result of this injury.
To date, there have been limited advances in therapeutic treatment or correction related to SCI, with any therapeutic development focused on treatment of SCI-related symptoms as opposed to the condition itself.
In this study, Muthu et al. analyze evidence of the efficacy and safety of mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) therapy in human subjects with traumatic SCI and identify the therapy’s potential for the future management of SCI.
To analyze this evidence, the authors identified and reviewed studies evaluating the efficacy and safety of stem cell therapy for SCI. Specifically, Muthu et al. screened 321 research articles before narrowing this study down to 66 full-text reviews and finally identifying 19 studies that fit the criteria for this review.
These 19 studies involving 670 subjects demonstrated that those in the identified intervention groups showed statistically significant improvement in key measurement criteria, including the American Spine Injury Association (ASIA) impairment scale grade improvement, ASIA sensorimotor score, activities of daily living score, residual urine volume, bladder function, light touch, and pinprick response.
The authors also found that while no significant difference was noted in motor score or activities of daily living scores, and that the intervention group has significant increase in complications, no serious or permanent adverse events were reported.
Considering these findings, Muthu et al.’s analysis establishes the efficacy and safety of MSC transplantation in the specific areas highlighted above (improvements in AIS grade, ASIA sensory score, and bladder function) without major adverse events. The authors also call for further research to better understand standardized dosing, time, route of administration, and source of MSCs used for transplantation.
Source: Muthu S, Jeyaraman M, Gulati A, Arora A. Current evidence on mesenchymal stem cell therapy for traumatic spinal cord injury: systematic review and meta-analysis. Cytotherapy. 2021 Mar;23(3):186-197. doi: 10.1016/j.jcyt.2020.09.007. Epub 2020 Nov 9. PMID: 33183980.
Neuropathic pain (NP) occurs when the nerves located either inside or outside of the brain and spinal cord are damaged by a lesion or a condition. To date, pharmacological and surgical treatments to address NP have focused on providing symptomatic relief without treating the underlying cause of the condition. These treatment approaches have not been overwhelmingly successful with over 50% of NP patients attaining adequate pain relief.
Recently, an increasing amount of pre-clinical and clinical research has demonstrated cell transplantation-based therapy for NP to be a promising treatment alternative.
In this review, Yin et al. summarize the use of cell grafts for the treatment of NP, synthesize the latest advances and adverse effects, and discuss possible mechanisms to further the development of cell transplant-based therapies for NP.
Neural stem cells (NSCs) demonstrate the ability to divide, self-renew, and differentiate into neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes; they are also present in a wide array of tissues throughout the body. Considering they are capable of differentiating into neurons and glial, NSCs are considered an ideal candidate cell for replacing damaged nerve cells and delivering trophic factors to the site of lesions contributing to NP. Additional studies have demonstrated NSCs ability to regenerate nerves, offer neuroprotective effects, and secrete a number of factors that enhance the survival of motor and sensory neurons. NSCs transplantation coils also ease NP caused by peripheral nerve injury, a potential benefit that has been observed in animal models.
Olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) are glial cells that surround and enclose the olfactory nerve bundle and possess the unique ability to transgress the peripheral nervous system (PNS) and central nervous system (CNS). Considering OECs have been shown to have neuro-regenerative functions, they are also considered to be a good choice for treating nerve injury and NP. Studies using animal models have confirmed that OECs transplantation could promote motor recovery and mitigate pain. Although OECs have good prospects of being used for treating NP, the authors call for additional research with longer observation time to verify their long-term effects and safety.
Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) can be obtained from a wide variety of sources and can be induced to differentiate into endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm cell lines. MSCs are often used for the treatment of diseases involving neuroinflammatory components and have been shown in animal studies to potentially alleviate NP symptoms.
Other cell therapies currently being evaluated for use as a treatment for NP include bone marrow mononuclear cells, GABAergic cells, and genetically modified cells.
The authors conclude that, despite the small number of clinical studies and the lack of systematic evidence, cell therapy as a treatment alternative for NP should be further explored. Specifically, further research should examine the optimal transplantation route, transplantation timing, number of transplanted cells, and transplantation survival rate.
Regenerative medicine options like stem cell treatments are growing in popularity both because of their potential effectiveness and because they can help you avoid invasive procedures like surgeries. Stem cell therapies focus on helping your body improve what it already does naturally — heal injuries.
Stem cells are the cells from which all differentiated cells form. They can come from your bone marrow or fat, with some people also turning to umbilical cord stem cells for treatment. But how do you know if you could benefit from stem cell therapy?
Those With Sports Injuries
If you play sports, you know that injuries can occur at any moment. You can twist your body in an unnatural way or suffer an impact that damages joints or ligaments. Minor injuries usually benefit from ice packs and rest, but healing can take time.
Healing is also a delicate process that can be disrupted. If that occurs, the injury might not heal completely and could lead to chronic issues that impact your mobility and even cause lasting pain.
When you turn to stem cell therapies, you can speed up the healing process. This type of regenerative medicine helps reduce inflammation, making it easier for nutrients and oxygen to get to the site of the injury.
Increased oxygen and nutrients are particularly important when dealing with ligaments and cartilage, which naturally don’t receive much blood flow.
Those With Arthritis
Arthritis is a debilitating condition in which your joints’ cartilage starts to deteriorate. The cartilage is what cushions your joints, preventing the bones from rubbing against one another. Once the cartilage breaks down, you can experience pain, stiffness, and mobility issues. In some cases, it can even cause joint deformity.
Stem cells, especially mesenchymal stem cells, release anti-inflammatory factors that help with pain and encourage your body to heal the damaged areas. Stem cells injected into the affected joint can reduce swelling, helping reduce pain and also restoring some mobility to stiff joints.
One of the best things about stem cell therapies for arthritis is that this kind of treatment is minimally invasive.
Those With Spinal Cord Injuries
Spinal cord injuries may severely impact your quality of life. You may struggle to perform everyday tasks and could face mobility issues that leave you dependent on others.
Spinal cord injuries are particularly difficult to treat because healing tends to plateau as a result of microenvironmental changes like inflammation, glial scar formation, and more. Stem cells can help because of their power to reduce inflammation, allowing the healing process to continue.
Ongoing treatment with stem cells could offer an improvement in mobility and a reduction in pain levels.
Those With Traumatic Injuries
After a major injury, like one that results from a car accident, healing can seem impossible. You may experience significant pain and could be dealing with mobility concerns that require physical therapy and even surgery.
Stem cell therapy works well in conjunction with physical therapy and other treatments because it utilizes cells from your body gathered in a minimally invasive way. You can continue other therapeutic programs while giving your body the chance to reduce inflammation so that blood can reach the injury site.
A better level of blood flow to the area not only brings nutrients and oxygen but also helps flush out toxins at the injury site that could make the symptoms worse.
Those Who’ve Gone Through Surgery
Going through surgery can put a lot of strain on your body. That is one of the reasons why the recovery process is often so long. If you’ve been through a surgical procedure, consider stem cell therapy.
Stem cell therapy can help reduce the recovery time so that you can start feeling more like yourself again. Inflammation is a huge concern. Think of the kinds of bruising you may have after a surgical procedure. Although stem cell therapy can’t prevent all inflammation and bruising, its use after surgery can reduce how much you experience.
If there’s less inflammation, the area can receive more nutrients and experience faster healing.
Those Who Need Joint Replacements
Replacing a joint is a surgical procedure that requires the implantation of an artificial joint and the removal of the damaged one. The recovery process for this type of procedure tends to be difficult, with many people experiencing mobility issues even as they heal because the artificial part hasn’t really integrated into the rest of the tissue.
If this type of surgery is something that you have to go through, adding stem cell therapy to the recovery process makes a difference. Stem cell therapies encourage the growth of new tissues around the artificial replacement that can make mobility easier and decrease pain, helping you get back to your life more rapidly.
Those With Degenerative Diseases
Degenerative diseases are chronic conditions that progressively get worse. They include diseases like:
For these conditions, a combination of treatments is usually most effective. They can include medications, physical therapy, and even surgery. By also turning to stem cell therapy, you have the chance to tackle the underlying cause of the problem so that you can get relief from symptoms.
Stem cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease, for example, focuses on helping restore the failing neurons that are in charge of producing dopamine. This could help with the management of dopamine levels and could even restore some function. In many instances, stem cell therapy for Parkinson’s can even slow down the disease.
Is Stem Cell Therapy Right for You?
Stem cell therapy might be able to offer the help you need with managing degenerative conditions, healing injuries, and providing pain relief that doesn’t rely on narcotics. You don’t have to worry about suffering allergic reactions or rejections because stem cell therapies usually rely on cells from your body.
If you’re considering stem cell treatments or want to know more about what the process involves and what you can expect, talk with a regenerative medicine specialist about the options available.
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a progressive autoimmune disease that affects the brain, spinal cord, and central nervous system (CNS). Affecting an estimated 3 million people worldwide, MS is typically characterized by an autoimmune response that results in inflammation, demyelination, and degeneration of axons.
Most patients who are diagnosed with MS demonstrate a disease progression characterized by periods of relapse and remission that can last for an extended duration.
There is no treatment that can yet address the various rates of MS progression. Additionally, current therapeutic approaches are designed to address the shortening of the duration of recovery following an attack, mitigating the progression of the disease, and attenuating the symptoms associated with MS.
Recently, mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have shown various ranges of effectiveness when used for treatment of autoimmune diseases in clinical trials. However, most of the trials utilizing MSCs for this purpose have been reported for a variety of reasons, including a low number of treated subjects, different doses used in the studies, the feasibility of autologous or allogeneic transplantation, and the unclear therapeutic window after the treatment effect.
Considering this, the purpose of Islam et al.’s systematic review and meta-analysis (SRMA) was to provide a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness and safety of MSC therapy in individuals diagnosed with MS. To achieve this, the authors identified studies that reported on the efficacy and safety of MSC therapy in human patients with MS based on the changes in the Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) score from baseline to follow-up period. This screening process resulted in a total of 30 studies being incorporated into the systematic review and 22 studies being included in the subsequent meta-analysis.
Islam et al. reported that, following MSC therapy, it was observed that 40.4% of the patients with MS experienced improvement; 32.8% of patients remained stable while 18.1% experienced a worsening of their condition. In terms of the safety of MSC therapy, the authors reported that while no major complications were observed, headaches (57.6%), fever (53.1%), urinary tract infections (23.9%), and respiratory tract infections (7.9%) were the most commonly reported adverse events.
While further research, the development of new technology, optimization of MSC doses, and larger clinical trials are needed to fully evaluate the use of MSC therapy in the treatment of MS, the authors conclude that the results of this SRMA indicate that MSC therapy seems to be an efficacious therapeutic strategy for treating patients with MS.
Source: Islam MA, Alam SS, Kundu S, Ahmed S, Sultana S, Patar A, Hossan T. Mesenchymal Stem Cell Therapy in Multiple Sclerosis: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Journal of Clinical Medicine. 2023; 12(19):6311. https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm12196311
According to the World Health Organization, at least 2.2 billion people worldwide have near or distant vision impairment. In at least 1 billion of these cases, vision impairment could have been prevented or has yet to be addressed. Glaucoma, corneal disease, and retinal disorders are among the leading contributors to these vision impairments.
Since the pathogenesis of these eye diseases is not fully understood, fully effective treatments have yet to be developed. Considering this, Li et al. reviewed recent research to examine the effectiveness of exosomes in various diseases in vivo, which provides the potential for a new option for the treatment of eye diseases.
Exosomes are extracellular small vesicles that are formed by the regulation of endocytosis, fusion, and efflux and contain a variety of biologically active substances, including proteins, miRNAs, IncRNAs, and lipids.
Exosomes are found in all biological fluids and have roles that vary depending on their origin. These roles include cell-to-cell communication, waste transfer, and regulation of the immune system in vivo. Additionally, when serving as a carrier, exosomes are involved in many pathological processes such as nerve repair, vascular regeneration, immune response, and fibrosis formation.
Examining the various roles exosomes play within the body, the authors of this review consider their role in the treatment of serious ocular diseases, including glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, and keratitis. Li et al. point to studies demonstrating exosomes’ ability to promote the repair of injured nerves, inhibit fibrosis, modulate immune function, and promote angiogenesis as evidence of the important role they have in treating ocular disease.
Specifically, exosomes contain a large number of immunosuppressive molecules that inhibit lymphocyte proliferation and effectively increase ocular immune tolerance to prevent ocular autoimmune disease.
Exosomes can also transfer protein and RNA to receptor cells and can accelerate wound healing of corneal epithelial cells, providing a new approach for treating large corneal lesions.
Studies have also demonstrated a link between exosomes and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) with specific exosomes considered to have neuroprotective effects that are closely related to the pathological progression of AMD.
The authors conclude that exosomes are able to be used as therapeutic carriers to participate in processes such as immune response, angiogenesis, and nerve repair in ocular-related diseases. While research into this is still emerging, the presence and accessibility of exosomes will become a potential way to diagnose and treat ocular diseases.
For the treatment of a variety of health conditions, one option more people are relying on is regenerative medicine. This field focuses on helping your body’s natural healing process function at its best, making it possible for tissues to regenerate so that you can obtain pain relief and improve mobility. There are various types of regenerative medicine. Learn more about them to know the choices you have.
Regenerative Medicine: What It Is and What It’s Used For
Regenerative medicine is a group of treatments focused on healing tissues throughout the body while also restoring the function you may have lost because of aging, medical conditions, and more.
When you’re young, your body is able to heal more efficiently, but the older you get, the longer the healing process can take. In some instances, this longer length of time even leads to the development of chronic pain issues that can be tough to deal with.
With regenerative medicine, you get the chance to try minimally invasive treatments that can offer results. Most of the best regenerative medicine options focus on stem cells, but some also rely on your blood’s components to provide lasting results.
Regenerative medicine can offer help for many types of issues, including:
The kind of condition you have may dictate the type of regenerative treatment that has the potential to be most effective.
The Different Kinds of Regenerative Medicine Therapies
There are many regenerative medicine therapies to choose from, but some of the most trusted include stem cell therapy, platelet-rich plasma, and prolotherapy.
What Is Stem Cell Therapy?
Stem cell therapy is a treatment option that utilizes stem cells to promote healing. Stem cells are undifferentiated cells that can create specialized ones. They have the ability to self-renew and create functional tissues, working as the body’s repair system.
During stem cell therapy, your healthcare provider injects stem cells into the treatment area. There are different types of stem cells, including adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells.
Adult stem cells are undifferentiated cells found in various tissues throughout the body, including fat and bone marrow. They have a more limited ability to differentiate than embryonic stem cells, but they are much more readily available because they come from your body.
Mesenchymal stem cells are found in fat and bone marrow, among other tissues, and they can help the body respond to inflammation and promote healing.
What Is Platelet-Rich Plasma?
Your blood is made up of a few components, including:
White blood cells
Red blood cells
Plasma
Platelets
Plasma is the liquid portion of blood. Platelets are not actually cells but cell fragments that help with the clotting process and contain growth factors that can stimulate cellular reproduction as well as healing at the treatment site. Platelet-rich plasma refers to plasma that has more platelets than usual.
To create a PRP injection, your doctor takes a sample of your blood and runs it through a centrifuge. The centrifuge spins the sample very rapidly, dividing the blood components so that your doctor can extract the platelets and add them to the plasma. This is then injected at the treatment area.
PRP therapy can be a good option for the treatment of ligament injuries, osteoarthritis, post-surgical healing, and even hair loss.
These injections work to reduce inflammation at the treatment site, which allows better circulation. More blood flow means the area receives more nutrients and oxygen, helping with the healing process. Less inflammation also means less pain.
What Is Prolotherapy?
Prolotherapy is another type of regenerative medicine that can be used to relieve pain. It involves injecting a small amount of an irritant, like sugar, into the treatment area. This irritant trigger an immune response and jumpstarts your body’s natural ability.
It shows promise in the treatment of musculoskeletal conditions, including issues with your bones, ligaments, soft tissues, and more.
Your body responds to the sugar or other irritant as a threat, triggering your immune and healing responses to rush to the area to remove the irritant and also begin the healing process.
Benefits of Regenerative Medicine
Regenerative medicine offers the chance to get relief from pain and inflammation without having to go through invasive procedures. Most regenerative medicine options require only a minimally invasive procedure, like providing a sample of blood or undergoing a mini liposuction procedure to obtain fat.
Because regenerative medicine procedures don’t require an elaborate process, you don’t have to worry about a long preparation or recovery period. You can usually get back to your normal life right after receiving treatment.
Regenerative medicine works to help manage the underlying cause of the pain you’re experiencing. It doesn’t just mask symptoms as pain medication and anti-inflammatories do. By offering the potential of healing injuries, it may be able to provide lasting relief.
Regenerative medicine is also more affordable than an invasive procedure like surgery. The surgery itself is costly, and the recovery can mean relying on physical therapies that add to the budget. That is not an issue you have to worry about with regenerative medicine options like stem cell therapy, PRP therapy, or prolotherapy.
Managing Pain and Inflammation with Regenerative Medicine
Regenerative medicine holds significant promise for the treatment of conditions that cause pain and inflammation. By relying on your natural healing process, regenerative medicine only improves what your body does.
If you’re considering regenerative medicine to help with any conditions you face, ask your healthcare provider about it to see if it’s a good choice for you.
This website and its contents are not intended to treat, cure, diagnose, or prevent any disease. Stemedix, Inc. shall not be held liable for the medical claims made by patient testimonials or videos. They are not to be viewed as a guarantee for each individual. The efficacy for some products presented have not been confirmed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
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