Introduction:
Heart disease or conditions are becoming major cause of death in the world, many research are going on to find the potential solution for this deadly condition. Recent study shows that the stem cell treatment is a potential answer to treat heart conditions. Heart disease patients treated with adult stem cells showed greater improvement in their heart health.
Adult stem cells are undifferentiated cells, which are present in the tissue or organs of an adult human. Origin of adult stem cells in most of the organs is still a mystery. Therefore to find an answer researches are going on in many laboratories. Adult stem cells have the potential to convert into a specialized cell or tissue under specific conditions, like the growth factors, minerals and other necessary components induce the multipotent adult stem cell to form a specialized cell or tissue.
Stem Cell Therapy:
Heart diseases, like heart failure or coronary artery disease, are progressive condition. That is these diseases or conditions become worse as time goes by. At present heart diseases are maintained throughout the life time of a patient, but it cannot be cured. Heart diseases are treated or rather maintained using drug therapy or surgery, but these therapies were not successful in preventing the progression of heart disease.
According to many studies and research the stem cell therapy was successful in regenerating diseased heart muscle in patients. One study also demonstrates that the damaged heart muscle was fully regenerated in a patient after heart attack.
Procedure:
The procedure known as intracoronary stem cell therapy are used to treat heart diseases with stem cell. In this procedure bone marrow stem cells are extracted from the patient suffering from the heart disease. This avoids the risk of rejection from the patient's immune system, and also immunosuppressant therapy is not needed.
Stem cells are introduced into the site of need, in this case heart via a blood vessel. First by making percutaneous intervention blood vessels are formed. Then a catheter is inserted and stem cells are injected into vessel, and the catheter is removed.
Heart Disease Improvements:
In one study conducted during 2007, critical patients with heart conditions treated with intracoronary stem cell therapy. After the treatment heart disease did not progress but it improved the heart condition.
Intracoronary stem cell therapy was successful in treating patient with wide range of heart diseases like heart muscle damage as a result of heart attack, or coronary artery diseases, weakened, enlarged heard, and heart damage as a result of high blood pressure.
Advantages:
Adult stem cells are extracted from the informed patients, so the use of stem cell is uncontroversial and also no social and ethical or legal barriers hinder the adult stem cell research and also therapy.
If stem cell therapy is used widely to treat the patients with heart diseases, the need for risky open heart surgery decreases.
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