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A new study in which patients had their hearts repaired with stem cells

The P1 study, which was chiefly conducted to evaluate safety, was published in an online edition of The Lancet medical journal.  It follows a similar trial by US scientists at Harvard Medical School and the University of Louisville whose findings were reported last year, also in The Lancet. That study, which used a different kind of heart stem cell, produced a 12% average increase in ejection fraction.

• The Caduceus trial recruited a total of 25 patients with an average age of 53 who had all suffered a heart attack in the previous month. Seventeen received coronary artery infusions of 12 to 25 million stem cells derived from healthy tissue taken from their own hearts. The remaining 8 underwent standard post-heart attack care;
• The therapy halved the extent of normally permanent scarring on the heart, and led to the growth of new heart muscle. However, the treatment produced no significant change in “ejection fraction” – a measure of the heart’s pumping capacity;
• A year later, the proportion of the heart left scarred in the stem cell-treated patients had been reduced from 24% to 12%. No change was seen in patients who did not receive the treatment.

The Bottom Line: There is a … however … future work will need to see if stem cell treatment can bring any long-term improvement in patients who experience heart failure after a heart attack. This occurs when a weakened heart is not strong enough to pump sufficient blood around the body, causing breathlessness and exhaustion.  This discovery challenges the conventional wisdom but, once established, scar is permanent and that, once lost, healthy heart muscle cannot be restored. The 2^nd however … is that … these cells have been proven to form heart muscle … in a Petri dish but now they seem to be doing the same thing when injected back into the heart as part of an … apparently safe procedure??