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Wheelchair-Bound Stroke Victim Walks Again After 'Unprecedented' Stem Cell Trial At Stanford (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: Stanford researchers studying the effect of stem cells injected directly into the brains of stroke patients said Thursday that they were "stunned" by the extent to which the experimental treatment restored motor function in some of the patients. The results, published in the journal Stroke, could have implications for our understanding of an array of disorders including traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury and Alzheimer's if confirmed in larger-scale testing. The work involved patients who had passed the critical six-month mark when recoveries generally plateau and there are rarely further improvements. Each participant in the study had suffered a stroke beneath the brain's outermost layer and had significant impairments in moving their arms and-or legs. The one-time therapy involved surgeons drilling a hole into the study participants' skulls and injecting stem cells in several locations around the area damaged by the stroke. These stem cells were harvested from the bone marrow of adult donors. They suffered minimal adverse effects such as temporary headaches, nausea and vomiting. "Their recovery was not just a minimal recovery like someone who couldn't move a thumb now being able to wiggle it. It was much more meaningful. One 71-year-old wheelchair-bound patient was walking again," said Steinberg, the study's lead author and chair of neurosurgery at Stanford who personally performed most of the surgeries. Steinberg said that the study does not support the idea that the injected stem cells become neurons, as has been previously thought. Instead, it suggests that they seem to trigger some kind of biochemical process that enhances the brain's ability to repair itself. "Patients improved by several standard measures, and their improvement was not only statistically significant, but clinically meaningful," Steinberg said. "Their ability to move around has recovered visibly. That's unprecedented. At six months out from a stroke, you don't expect to see any further recovery."
The breakfast of champions
This could save not just suffering but money - round-the-clock care isn't cheap.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
These were ADULT stem-cells. There is no need to say "See? Fetus stem cells work" *OR* "OMG! They're killing babies!".
It was truly a Miracle from God! Praise Jesus!
developed Hyde Syndrome, and became twisted caricatures of their original selves.
Where's the vaguely related link about the price of wheelchairs going through the roof?
and how were they compensated?
Is this report based on real research, or is someone just binge-watching Arrow right now?
Was the patient's name "F. Smoak"?
#DeleteChrome
Way before its time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRtlkcQ6brE
As noted when Killer B(ee?) demanded she hand over the only available chip (the one in her spine) in order to be able to control her bee drones directly without need of a computer.
Also: Ugh, the 'faux computer nerd' crap they're pushing on TV now. Also the ideal of magically injecting a chip with no other prepwork to magically make people walk again. (Not that it can't be done, but I REALLY doubt any that could actually be made prepless and injectable would also be REUSABLE.)
IANAD - It's my limited understand that the 'blood-brain-barrier' - while protects the brain - also inhibits the immune system from gaining access to it too. Perhaps it's not the stem cells. Perhaps, just a though, that the act of drilling holes is breaking the blood-brain-barrier enough for the immune system to go in a cleanup and make way for natural repair.
Any thoughts on this supposition; false or otherwise?
Life is not for the lazy.
The stem cells of the brain got green from envy of their partying, younger stem cell neighbors and wanted to feel young and fresh again. Thus, another cycle of regeneration, with a slight additional risk of cancer.
Tears. No words.
They should have sent a poet.
Who did what now?
The study is compelling, but the fact is they drilled burr holes to get those cells in there. Odd thing is: just drilling those holes can promote revascularization (it's a treatment for some conditions). So it's unclear what happened.
have a laugh from the past :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
People love to point out that President George W Bush had a policy that banned federal funding for embryonic stem cell research (The ban was only on tax dollars being used and only on NEW stem cell lines, non-taxpayer dollars on embryonic and even tax dollars on already existing lines were permitted).
What everybody likes to ignore for various partisan political/ideological reasons is that GWB was the first US President to have an official policy of using tax dollars on adult stem cell research. It's not that such research was not previously funded,just that it never got an official approval from that high-up in the government. Bush and his people spent months discussing the ethics of stem cell research (something that the founders of the nation would have expected but which IMHO government too infrequently does) with people across the political/philosophical spectrum before deciding on a policy that was, after all, about using money forcibly taken from the taxpayers (the policy was NOT about private money). The Bush team found broad support for adult stem cell research across all political lines from the far left to even the most religious on the political right, who are not "anti-science" at all but simply object to their tax dollars being used to support abortion, which they view as the deliberate murder of the most innocent.
The federal government was funding stem cell research before the Bush policy was announced, and has been officially supporting adult stem cell research with tax dollars ever since with strong bi-partisan political approval IN LAW ever since. The only thing that will harm government funding for adult stem cell research in the future will be either [1] general federal tax funding problems (we are now nearly $20,000,000,000,000.00 in debt - DOUBLE what we were when Obama was elected) which will at some point harm all federal spending, or [2] any attempt to link of adult stem cell research funding back to embryonic, and thus abortion.