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October 13, 2024
Five stroke victims have shown small signs of recovery following pioneering stem cell therapy.
Prof Keith Muir, of Glasgow University, said the results were ‘not what we would have expected’ from the group of patients who had previously shown no indications of their conditions improving.
The trial involved injecting stem cells directly into the damaged parts of the patients’ brains, with the hope that they would turn into healthy tissue or ‘kick-start’ the body’s own repair processes.
Professor Muir said he had seen people who now have the ability to move their fingers after ‘several years of complete paralysis.
Frank Marsh, 80, one of the nine elderly patients taking part in the trial at Glasgow’s Southern General Hospital, told the BBC he had seen improvements in the use of his left hand.
‘I can grip certain things that I never gripped before, like the hand rail at the baths, with my left hand as well as my right,’ he said.
‘It still feels fairly weak and it’s still a wee bit difficult to co-ordinate, but it’s much better than it was.He added: ‘I’d like to get back to playing my piano.’
His wife Claire said: ‘He had reached a plateau and wasn’t really improving (after his stroke). But following the operation he is able to do things he couldn’t do before, such as make coffee, dressing, and holding on to things.’
The study involved patients who suffered strokes some time ago and had shown no signs of making any further spontaneous improvement.
All of them had suffered a stroke between six months and five years before treatment. Generally it is thought that patients do not recover after the first six months of their stroke.
Prof Muir said the results were ‘at the present time not what we would have expected in this group but far from being able to say whether it’s something specifically related to the cells’.
He added: ‘My expectation had been that we would see very little change and if we did see change it would be a relatively short-lived temporary change. (But) we have seen changes that have been maintained over time,’ Prof Muir said.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘We know that some of the cells will survive and potentially turn into relevant tissue.
We also suspect that a large part of what we do is kick-starting repair processes that are already present in the body.
‘So there’s probably a mixture of things going on. Quite what it is that’s happening in the patients, we won’t know for some time to come.’
The stem cells were created 10 years ago from one sample of nerve tissue taken from a foetus.
The results of the trial will be presented at the European Stroke Conference in London.
A second trial later this year will try to establish whether improvements in stroke patients are due to the treatment. Even then, it could be a few years before the treatment becomes widely available.
Dr Clare Walton, Research Communications Officer at the Stroke Association, said: ‘When a stroke strikes the brain is starved of oxygen and as a result brain cells in the affected area die.
‘The use of stem cells is a promising technique which could help to reverse some of the disabling effects of stroke.
‘We are very excited about this trial; however, we are currently at the beginning of a very long road and significant further development is needed before stem cell therapy can be regarded as a possible treatment.’
Source Mail Online