Stem Cell Treatment for Heart Attacks

Two London hospitals–University College Hospital (UCH) and Bart’s and the London Heart Hospital–are set to begin using adult stem cells to treat up to 100 heart attack patients. The stem cells will come from the patients themselves and may help aid in the regeneration of damaged heart muscle.

Here are the steps participants in the clinical trial will take:

1. Upon admission to the hospital for a heart attack, patients are treated with a balloon angioplasty to open the blocked artery.
2. Bone marrow will be extracted from the patient’s hip bone
3. Stem cells will be filtered from the bone marrow
4. Half the patients will receive stem cells injected via the angioplasty catheter, half will receive placebo
5. Two years later, MRI scans and quality-of-life assessments will be performed to compare those who received stem cell treatment and those who did not.

Just to emphasize again – this particular stem cell treatment does NOT use embryonic stem cells, but adult stem cells from the heart attack patients themselves.

BBC News, November 8, 2006

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