Lifeline Cord Blood

BBC News

Stem cells, the body's master cells, are an effective treatment for patients who have had a heart attack, researchers have found. Sixty patients were treated either with stem cells taken from their own bone marrow, or with the best conventional treatment...

A heart attack takes place when blood vessels that supply blood to the heart are blocked, preventing enough oxygen from getting to the organ. The heart muscle dies or becomes permanently damaged, tissue is scarred and the heart becomes enlarged. Now for survivors of cardiac arrest, stem cell injections afterwards can help enlarged hearts recover in size and function...

The Sydney Morning Herald

Adult stem cells have been implanted in two Australian men with badly blocked arteries in what scientists say is a world first. Cardiologist Suku Thambar said 100 million stem cells were injected into the men's hearts...

MONDAY, March 31, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- Stem cells injected directly into heart muscle can help patients suffering from severe heart failure by improving an ailing heart's ability to pump blood, a new Danish trial indicates.

Stem cell therapies may extend the lives of people with heart disease if used as a complement to standard treatments, according to a new review published in The Cochrane Library. Stem cells used in the research were harvested from the patients’ blood or bone marrow and used to repair the damaged heart or blood vessels.

Putnam Valley, NY. (Mar. 6, 2014) – When human umbilical cord blood cells were transplanted into rats that had undergone a simulated myocardial infarction (MI), researchers investigating the long term effects of the transplantation found that left ventricular (LV) heart function in the treated rats was improved over those that did not get the stem cells. The animals were maintained without immunosuppressive therapy.

By Michael Kahn

LONDON (Reuters) – Doctors may one day be able to use stem cells taken from umbilical cord blood to build new heart valves for children born with heart defects, German scientists said on Monday. These valves could grow as a child develops, doing away with any need for repeated operations to replace outgrown...

Future Medicine

In research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2008, a team of researchers from the University Hospital of Munich, Germany, have built human heart valves from umbilical cord blood. Infants with heart valve malfunction that cannot be fixed by surgery are reliant upon replacement valves...

"We are encouraged by our findings because they could pave the way to a non-invasive, promising new therapy for a group of patients who face grim odds," said study corresponding author Fernando Figueroa, M.D., professor of medicine at the Universidad de los Andes in Chile.
In this trial, 30 patients, ages 18 to 75, with stable heart failure receiving optimal drug therapy underwent intravenous infusions with either umbilical cord-derived stem cells or placebo. The umbilical cords were obtained from full-term human placentas from healthy donors by caesarean section after informed consent.