Stem cells offer hope for paraplegics
07 August 2005
By GREG MEYLAN
http://www.stuff.co.nz/Kiwi doctors are planning an experimental operation to partially
repair paraplegics' damaged spinal cords, using stem cells extracted
from their noses. The operation awaits ethical approval, but is based on a procedure developed in a Portuguese hospital over the past three years. Dunedin neurosurgeon Grant Gillett has performed the operation at a Lisbon hospital and has just returned from a conference in Marrakech where the results of the operation were presented.
"Nobody who has had an operation is worse off than beforehand," said
Gillett. "Some people have reported almost instantaneous improvements, such as more awareness of what is going on in their
bladder and felt they had more control over muscles at the edge of
their disability." But it was not clear how long the improvements lasted or whether they were entirely due to the operation rather than intensive post-operative rehabilitation. Gillett said the Dunedin team might offer the operation to two or three New Zealand patients, possibly before the end of the year if approval was granted. Stem cells are seen as one of medicine's brightest hopes, but their use has been controversial because they are usually harvested from embryos left over from IVF treatments or cloned embryos created for the purpose.
This has angered right-to-life campaigners and religious groups who believe the process destroys a human life. Scientists have used stem cells to repair the severed spinal cords of rats. Gillett said rats appeared to repair nerve damage much more easily than humans.
"But for a long time I said there was no new thing and then this
Portuguese stuff turned up two or three years ago and it looks like
a real possibility." In March, Rotorua woman Willy Terpstra went to China for a treatment of her motor neurone disease, in which two million stem cells from aborted foetuses were injected into her brain. She reported immediate improvement, but this has since faded to the point where she said last month she would not do it again because the result was too poor and the operation too expensive.
Nerve stem cells can be relatively easily harvested from an area at
the top of the nose. Spinal Cord Society president Noela Vallis said she had been working to find a cure since her husband, who died last year, became a paraplegic 20 years ago. The stem cell operation offered the best hope yet.
"It's brilliant, but we're careful not to raise false hopes."
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