Stem Cells Could Recover Damaged Heart Muscles: German Scientists

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Stem Cells Could Recover Damaged Heart Muscles: German Scientists

Implantation of bone-marrow stem cells in the heart might be a new method to help heart attack victims recover, a new research found.

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Implantation of bone-marrow stem cells in the heart might be a new method to help heart attack victims recover, a new research found.

The stem cells may help new tissue to grow within the organ, a group of scientists from the University of Rostock in Germany reported in the British medical journal The Lancet to be published on Saturday.

When the heart is deprived of blood during a heart attack, heart muscle cells die because of the lack of oxygen. Even if the patient survives the attack, the heart may never recover to the level it was prior to the attack.

Laboratory experiments have shown that bone-marrow cells injection could help damaged heart tissue to regenerate. Scientists believed that bone-marrow stem cells, which had the ability to grow into many different types of cell, are prompted to grow into new tissues.

The German researchers injected bone-marrow cells into the damaged border zone in six patients who had have a heart attack and undergone heart bypass surgery.

Three to nine months after surgery, all patients were alive and well, global left-ventricular function was enhanced in four patients, and damaged tissue perfusion had improved strikingly in five patients.

While this is not proof that the stem cells had anything to do with it, it is encouraging for the researchers.

Professor Gustav Steinhoff, who led the team, said: "We have shown that local bone marrow stem cell implantation together with a bypass operation is safe."

"Controlled studies are needed to clarify the role of cell transplantation in myocardial regeneration," he added.

Another team from the University of Hong Kong carried out a similar experiment, also described in The Lancet. They injected stem cells into eight patients, all of whom had improved heart function three months later.

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