Hearts being repaired!
I have often taught that after 5 minutes the effects of an Heart Attack are permanent. Now there is real hope for victims of a Sudden Cardiac Attack! This article aired on ABC, here is a reprint of the actual article from "The World Today, By Meredith Griffiths
Updated November 17, 2011 12:34:58".
There is promising news for people at risk of heart failure after US researchers found stem cell therapy in humans has been surprisingly successful in replacing damaged muscle and getting the heart to pump better.
The research revealed at the American Heart Association's annual conference in Florida could revolutionize the way heart failure is treated. Even when people survive heart attacks the damage is quite severe. Scar tissue means the heart cannot pump as well, and about 50 per cent of people die within five years.
It is these patients who may benefit from the stem cell treatments being trial led.
One treatment was led by Emerson Perin from the Texas Heart Institute. His team took stem cells from an adult's bone marrow and injected it into 60 patients.
"All the cells are obtained for one healthy donor in which they build bone marrow and then they pick out a certain stem cell and that stem cell then is expanded and you can expand that stem cell to create 1,000 doses if you wanted," he said.
"So all the patients got treated with basically the same cells from the same healthy young patients and so this is very much like a blood transfusion."
AUDIO: Stem cell success for heart trials (The World Today)
The researchers did not expect the therapy to be so effective - they were just trying to make sure it was safe. "We saw some of the hearts pumping better and some of the volumes of the heart getting smaller and patients able to walk further," he said.
Dr Perin said the most impressive results of the trial were from the clinical events, known as major adverse cardiac event (MACE).He said there was a significant decrease in the adverse clinical events, including cases of death.
"Three in 15 patients - with the controlled patients - there were three cardiac deaths, and in 45 of the treated patients there was only one cardiac death.
"Even though the numbers are small, there is a very significant difference in mortality from heart causes in these patients."
Boosting heart function
The conference also heard about a separate study by researchers in Kentucky and California in which 16 patients were treated with their own stem cells.
Chief medical adviser of the Heart Foundation, James Tatsoulis, says the success of the treatment could be due to the fact it was using the patients' own stem cells.
"We've known a bit about stem cells in heart disease for about the last 10 years but the results have been fairly mixed. But this is the first study that's really been conducted in humans using... the patients' own heart stem cells," he said.
"In the study these cells boosted the heart function by about 15 to 20 per cent and they also were also able to reduce the area of heart muscle damage by about 25 per cent. So these are findings never seen before."
Professor Tatsoulis expects the treatment could be available within five years.
"There's a lot still to be researched as to what the correct number of cells to be injected is, whether the timing is correct, whether we need to do it on repeated occasions and those sorts of issues," he said.
"But it's incredibly promising and all the techniques which are used are readily available, and in fact will be accessible for many people that actually have heart failure."
More than 300,000 Australians suffer from heart failure.
First posted November 15, 2011 20:22:02
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