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Stem cell transplant - better safe than sorry.
(From The Korea Herald)
By Andy Ho The Straits Times / Asia News Network Some readers wrote to me recently about an experimental heart operation carried out on a 60-year-old man in a Kuala Lumpur hospital and asked why Singapore didn't have such a capability.
In that operation, which made the front pages of Malaysian papers, 20 doctors from Malaysia and Japan injected stem cells from the man's bone marrow into his diseased heart muscles. The operation was carried out because the patient had been suffering from recurrent chest pains despite a coronary artery bypass in 1997, and was deemed unsuitable for other procedures. One week after the six-hour operation he was presented at a press conference where he declared he was 'very comfortable now compared to before' and 'it doesn't hurt to breathe any more.' Stem cells are baby cells with the potential to develop into specific tissue cells. In his case, stem cells had been extracted from bone marrow in his hip-bone. The marrow is the soft centre of large bones where blood stem cells continuously replenish the body's red and white blood cells and platelets.
Usually, bone marrow is extracted with a large needle and then transfused like blood into a patient. In this case, however, it was processed to yield stem cells instead. Adult blood stem cells can develop into blood cells but also into a few other types of tissues to replenish worn-out ones.
The Kuala Lumpur attempt comes on the heels of small trials in the United States and Japan in which such adult stem cells extracted from the bone marrow are said to have brought new life to damaged hearts. But no systematic clinical studies have been completed yet. There are only anecdotal reports of success, like the Malaysian case.
The world's first transplant with any stem cell was carried out on a 16-year-old American boy who was shot through the heart by a nail gun in February this year. Short of a heart transplant, using his own blood stem cells to regenerate his heart muscles and stimulate new blood vessels to grow was the only option.
Stem cells harvested from the boy's bone marrow were transplanted into his heart, which pumped better within days. The ...
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