Potential treatments:Wikipedia’s Stem Cell Treatments article – The “Potential Treatments” listed in this article are: Brain damage, cancer, spinal cord injury, muscle damage, heart damage, low blood supply, baldness, missing teeth, deafness, blindness and vision impairment, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease).
Professor Hans Kierstead of UC Irvine repairs rat’s spine with stem cell injections:Christopher Thomas Scott (Head of Stanford University’s Program on Stem Cells and Society), Stem Cell Now (2006) – “The ‘before’ videotape shows a rat with a recently damaged spinal cord. Staggering inside a circular Plexiglas container, the animal drags its hindquarters along the runway, its tail trailing limply behind. The next segment shows the same rat after an injection of oligodendrocytes made from a line of embryonic stem cells. It sniffs the air and stands on its rear legs. Dropping down, it takes a lap around the cage with only a slight suggestion of a limp — once disabled, now cured. The revived rat is compelling visual evidence that Professor Hans Kierstead uses to wow audiences of scientists, patients, and news reporters…Repairing damaged human nerves can be a major medical victory — the success would ripple far beyond spinal injury to demyelinating diseases, such as multiple sclerosis.”
Rebuilding heart after infarct:“Embryonic Stem Cell Therapy Shows Steady Benefits In Rebuilding Infarcted Heart” Mayo Clinic research published in American Journal of Physiology-Heart 8/18/04 – “Using embryonic stem cells, Mayo Clinic researchers transformed these master cell types into fully functional cardiac cells and transplanted them into damaged regions of the myocardium, where the cells integrated into the infarct and showed rapid and robust improvements, which were stable over an extended period post-therapy… Despite improvements in earlier diagnosis and treatment, cardiovascular disease is far and away the leading cause of death in the U.S. and the world. According to the latest posted statistics, heart disease causes 700,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, with the number of adults diagnosed with heart disease exceeding 23 million, or 11.5% of the adult population.”
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