Archive for the ‘stem cell facts’ Category

Stem Cell Treatment for Tay-Sachs Disease

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

[Hanceville, Alabama, USA –  As Reported on CBS42]  

She’s only 16 months old and full of surprises. A little girl with a disease so rare, only a handful are diagnosed each year.  Aspen Brown lives with Tay-Sachs disease. CBS42 first introduced you to Aspen last month. She had difficulty holding her head up, her eyes weren’t alert, and she couldn’t cry.  Her health continued to deteriorate.  There is no cure for Tay-Sachs.

Researchers believe a stem cell procedure is the only possible treatment for the deadly disease.  So Aspen’s family travelled to Peru, hoping and praying for a miracle.  Now, they’re back home in Hanceville.

Aspen underwent two rounds of Stem Cell Treatment. Aspen’s mother, Brandy, says the results were immediate.

“The next day after treatment, she raised her head up and for the first time I was actually able to see her neck,” Brandy says. “She was real floppy before and wouldn’t hold herself with her muscles, and when I picked her up this time you could feel her resisting and her muscles working.”

Watch the video below to view Aspen’s amazing progress so far.

Adult Stem Cells–Best-Kept Secret, Treating Juvenile Diabetes

Saturday, October 16th, 2010

Adult Stem Cells Best Kept Secret

By David Prentice of the FRCBlog
October 15, 2010

Adult stem cells have already shown amazing progress treating Type I (juvenile) diabetes, as Dr. Jean Peduzzi Nelson noted in her September Senate testimony. As reported in 2009 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 20 of 23 patients became insulin-independent after treatment with their own bone marrow adult stem cells. The authors note in the paper that this adult stem cell treatment “remains the only treatment capable of reversing type 1 diabetes in humans.” Their initial success with this adult stem cell treatment had been published in 2007; some patients are still insulin-independent.

Jaider Abbud, a young dental surgeon in Brazil, is one of the first patients ever to be treated for Type I Diabetes using adult stem cells (Jaider, on the right, is pictured with Dr. Julio Voltarelli, one of the doctors who treated him.) He was testing his blood and taking multiple insulin shots every day. In a talk he gave on Capitol Hill in 2007, a year after his treatment, Jaider described his diagnosis and life with juvenile diabetes, and how he hadn’t taken insulin or any medication since receiving his adult stem cell transplant.