Panama City, Panama
The stakes were high, literally life or death, but a 68-year-old Air Force Major decided to take the gamble.
With the hopes of returning to the life he loves in Green Valley, where he lives in The Springs with his two dogs, Buck decided to try to revive his failing heart with the stem cell therapy.
Doctors implanted Buck’s own stem cells into his heart at the Bangkok Heart Hospital.
An important mechanism for controlling the behavior of adult stem cells has been discovered by scientists at the Forsyth Institute.
Involved in cell-to-cell communication, the proteins in the flatworm, planaria, are play a novel role as researchers have observed.
Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness in the developed world.
Some 25.6 million Americans are affected by heart disease according to the 2005 data from The National Center for Health Statistics. With over 650,000 dying every year, it was the biggest killer of U.S. citizens at the time. Little has changed. Only two options, a heart transplant or death, awaited patients as they deteriorated and medication or surgery on their heart failed to help. But today, there is another choice.
Using a patients own adult stem cells, a company based in Bangkok, Thailand, is trying to show that a realistic third option exists. Millions of adult stem cells are grown from a mere half pint of the patient’s own blood and then implanted into the occluded heart blood vessels or damaged heart muscle. The technique is performed by cardiac specialists in world-class hospitals in Thailand and most (about 70%) of the 250 patients that have been treated thus far attest that their quality of life has improved since treatment.
The option of adult stem cell therapy was kept from Terry, who is a Morgantown, West Virginia patient. He is among the many who do not receive this information from their cardiologists. What may be more shocking, is that he could reasonably have expected to receive the best and most advanced treatment options available to medical science considering that he was a patient at the prestigious teaching hospital attached to the University of West Virginia. He had only one small vessel left pumping blood to the front of his heart following several heart attacks. After going through more than half a dozen operations to insert stents, six bypasses, he did not want a transplant. He believed his death was written in stone.
Shortness of breath and pain was the daily trend for Terry. He wanted to be around a little longer to enjoy his grandchildren and the rest of his family but at only 60 years of age, he could not walk a hundred feet without tightness in his chest. He thought that more could have been done to help him, and he was upset with the feeling of hopelessness. But his daughter found out about the stem cell option while she was doing research online.
“I think it’s a total shame that I cannot get the help I need at home. I found out that there is some research going on with adult stem cells in the U.S. but they are like five year trials. I couldn’t wait five years. There’s going to be a lot of people dead in five years and they wouldn’t have to be dead if they knew about adult stem cell therapy,” he said.
“I hope ten people read my story and go out and tell ten more people so that everybody comes to understand what this is all about. I was using my own body to help, or perhaps cure, my own body. There is no rejection factor and it took only a small incision in my chest wall and an injection of my own stem cells into the heart. Once implanted these cells do what they are programmed to do – revascularize to improve blood flow to my useless heart muscle. While my wife shopped and visited the temples and markets I lay back in a superb hospital with fantastic care to get well,” he added.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).
Pro-life conservatives are often accused of placing faith before progress by opponents of the ethical limitations on scientific research. Ironically, faith is exactly the primary element in their assertion that only embryonic stem cells will be able to treat our worst ailments.
This point was demonstrated when President Bush vetoed a bill that would force taxpayers to fund the experimental destruction of human embryos, Senator Hillary Clinton was quite critical of the decision.
Said Clinton: “Our scientists have been set back years in the race for life-saving cures because they’ve been held back by a narrow ideology that rejects sound science.”
President Bush on the other hand, strenuously encouraged non-controversial stem cell research and directed Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt to do just that. This fact is conveniently omitted by Senator Clinton in her criticism.
It is as if Bush and fellow conservatives reject stem cell research entirely. Or at least that is what many politicians, pundits, and journalists claim. This is at the very best, lazy. And completely misleading the public at its worst. Those opposed to embryonic stem cells research want to cure loved ones as well. They get injured, sick, and paralyzed too. The difference is that there is a better way to find cures that doesn’t involve the killing of embryos.
Using cord blood stem cells, and those derived from amniotic and other adult sources, thousands of patients have been treated worldwide. But Senator Clinton won’t tell anyone this. With increasing frequency, ethical stem-cell advancements are now being reported almost every day.
These non-controversial treatments and their benefits to those suffering from more than 70 different conditions can easily be found in peer-reviewed scientific literature that is free to access.
Thus far, no documented success in human trials has been achieved using embryonic stem-cell research. Tumor formation still plagues mice, even after 26 years of testing. This is where the fanatics of embryonic stem cell research come in. Faith in scientific arrogance. These individuals see ethics as excess baggage on a journey to a pseudo-future.
These advocates still march on despite all the scientists urging pundits to stop the hype, no embryonic stem cell success ever achieved in history, and venture capitalists fearful to invest because of the risk of failure. While all this goes on, non-controversial adult stem cell research and treatment flourishes.
The first goal should be to support and pour all our available resources into ethically sound sources of stem cells. It would be cruel to deny help to the suffering while those faithful to speculative research insist on spending public funds on the least likely path to cures.
Perhaps Ron Reagan said it best when he addressed the Democratic National Convention in his 2004 prime-time speech: “Their belief is just that, an article of faith, and they are entitled to it. But it does not follow that the theology of a few should be allowed to forestall the health and well-being of the many.”
Reagan was unaware at the time how applicable his statement would be to present day stem cell research.
With the potential to save millions of lives worldwide, Australia’s top heart specialists believe they have found a treatment to stop heart disease in its tracks.
The groundbreaking discovery which involves using adult stem cells from patients to repair their own hearts will be revealed today by experts from the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital.
With the ability to repair dead tissue in the heart as well as generate new blood vessels, the treatment is a world-first.
The changes appear to be permanent.
Claiming 17 million lives each year, heart disease is the world’s #1 killer.
Accounting for 35% of all deaths in Australia, 50,000 of the 3.5 million sufferers die annually.
In order to release beneficial stem cells from bone marrow into the bloodstream the new treatment involves injecting patients with a hormone to accomplish this task.
The cells restore circulation and create new blood vessels in the heart to boost heart function.
Promoters of non-controversial adult stem cell research say that priority funding should be directed not towards destructive embryonic experiments but adult stem cell research given the promising results that have been achieved with the latter.
To testify to the effectiveness of adult and other non-embryonic stem cell research, a bioethics specialist, researchers, and patients joined in a news conference in Washington.
The life of a New York woman was almost destroyed because of a root canal treatment that became infected. Once an active individual, the infection spread causing Ann to have difficulty breathing as the bacteria multiplied and spread towards her heart. Her heart began to fail when one of her heart valves stopped functioning properly.
Ann was rushed to have immediate valve repair once the doctors found the source of the problem which was initially mistaken for pneumonia. She grew sick of being tired all the time as the months following surgery became a struggle.
A company in Bangkok, Thailand was reporting success using a patient’s own adult stem cells to treat cardiomyopathy, ischemic heart disease, and congestive heart failure. The woman investigated further, intrigued by the possibility of getting her life back. Ann had made up her mind to the extent of 50/50, but the tipping point came when over Thanksgiving, she couldn’t pick up her grandson.
According to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine, patients who do not respond to initial chemotherapy may be aided by a new treatment that has been discovered by researchers at IU
She was at a wedding last summer when she suffered her fourth heart attack. Carron was hanging Japanese lanterns as part of her job when the 58-year-old event planner and mother of two felt the familiar pain in her chest. The doctor told her that she was on her last string and the next time could be her last. An evaluation showed that she was getting less than 50% efficiency from the right side of her heart. Stents didn’t work so they tried a defibrillator. When those measures proved unsuccessful, a heart transplant list got another name.
“All I could do was cry,” she says. “I just thought, ‘I’m about to die.’ There’s 100,000 people waiting for a heart.”
As autumn approached, her condition worsened.
“I couldn’t walk 20 feet without being on somebody’s arm,” Morrow says. “I couldn’t go to the mall. My legs just wouldn’t carry me. I knew I had really gotten worse.”
Her church rallied and offered support.
“Each time I’ve had one of these heart attacks, the church has surrounded me in prayer,” she says.
Carron’s health records were eventually sent to Texas thanks to her nurse. She had been researching adult stem cell therapy and had watched over Carron since her third heart attack. It was during her research that she learned of a groundbreaking study at the Texas Heart Institute.
“Within a month’s time, I was in Texas,” she says.
But the study would be limited, with only 30 people admitted. There would be 10 placebo patients, and 20 stem cell patients.
“I started praying,” Morrow says. “They called me at a quarter to five.”
More than a decade ago, the research began in Brazil, and now Carron would be involved with it.
The treatment was not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and for the surgery to take place, she had to sign liability papers.
“My next choice was just to drop dead, so I signed everything,” she says, “and had full confidence in that group.”
Carron when into surgery on October 14th, 2006 – her birthday. From her left hip, 50cc of bone marrow was removed and stem cells were cultivated from the tissue. She was back in surgery only four hours later, and the right side of her heart was injected with 30 million stem cells.
Carron had a great deal of traveling to do after the procedure. She remained in Texas for nine days, but had to return every two weeks until January. All her plane trips were paid for by a local businessman who as a catering client of hers.
“I knew within two months something was going on,” Morrow says. “I could sing a whole song at church.”
By December, she “was plating food as hard as any other chef there.”
In April, “I had a huge wedding in Jackson, Mississippi. We put in 80 hours that week. My sister said, ‘Carron, you know you have the stem cells.'”
It was confirmed the following week in Texas: “This little bitty envelope had ‘stem cell’ in it.”
To measure her progress, she had another CT scan performed on her heart. She went to the University of Alabama for the scan this month, the same place where she was informed of her bleak outlook only a year ago.
“The doctor calls and says, ‘Ma’am, the right side of your heart is normal.'”
She had the scan results faxed to Montgomery because she was sure there had been a mistake.
“I was in la-la land for several days.”
On June 7th, she was on PBS in a featured documentary.
“I told the doctor, ‘I don’t understand why we have this huge political mess going on about stem cells,'” Morrow says. “I’m living proof that adult stem cells work far better than embryonic. And why should embryonic even be in discussion?”
“I’m here to say, ‘I’m living proof. It saved my life.”
“I’m just doing great.”
Her defibrillator is no longer needed, an $85,000 remedy that completely failed. Less than $600 was needed to culture Carron’s stem cells.
“This is going to revolutionize heart disease.”
“This community has been such a strength for me,” she says. “I am just so blessed. I feel so undeserving. I am not a perfect person. I just am overwhelmed with how good God is to me.”
“I have been given an opportunity
