Neurological Conditions – Stem Cell Treatment

There are, as yet, no available stem cell treatments for neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Multiple Sclerosis, stroke, or spinal cord injury. This is due to the fact that the evidence showing safety and efficacy of such stem cell treatments is sorely lacking, although a number of clinical trials are underway to investigate the potential of stem cell therapy for neurological disease. Researchers have now found that de novo generation of neurons in the central nervous system (CNS) does occur even after perinatal development, which was thought, for many years to be the limit of new neural development. Investigations into the presence of a persistent germinal zone in the CNS which contains neural stem cells has found that adult humans retain the capacity to generate new neurons and glial cells throughout most of their lives, just at a much reduced level compared to infants. These neural stem cells are located in the subgranular layer of the hippocampus, and the subependymal zone and scientists have now managed to cultivate neural stem cells from tissue taken from these areas of the brain along with spinal cord tissue, and even from adipose-derived stem cells.

Neural Stem Cells and Other Cell Sources

The majority of stem cell research into neurological conditions and neural cells has made use of neural stem cells extracted from the subependymal zone of neonatal mice as the proliferation of these cells is extremely rapid. Human embryonic stem cells and adult CNS tissue have also been used in research but are, currently, less suited to the purposes of studying neural cell differentiation. Neural cells originate in the endoderm of an embryo, which forms after several days in the center of the embryonic cell mass. These cells then result in myocytes, neurons, endoderm, and keratinocytes after another six to eight days. Scientists can use different growth media in the laboratory to encourage the growth of neural progenitor cells rather than non-neural cells. Research is still limited to some extent by the problem of identifying the neural stem cells early enough to separate them from the other cells in the cell mass aggregate (embryoid body). Nevertheless, researchers have been able to implant the embryoid body into the CNS of rodents in some studies and successfully replace damaged glia and neurons with healthy cell growth.

Neurological Injury Stem Cell Trials

Those with neurological injury or diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Parkinson’s Disease, or stroke, are hopeful that the trials now underway using similar techniques to treat human patients will be as successful as those using rodent models. Each year in the US there are nearly 1.5million new patients who suffer some type of traumatic brain injury (TBI), adding to the 6million or so existing patients with permanent physical, psychosocial, and/or cognitive deficits from previous trauma. This means that there is considerable focus on the potential for stem cell treatments to aid regeneration and repair of damaged neurological tissue with the hope that therapies with long-term benefits are able to be developed rather than the reliance on current palliative care for chronic conditions.

Read More –> Sources of Neural Stem Cells
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