By Xinhua
Beijing : New study has questioned therapies using stem cell transplants in the brains to treat patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD).
The transplanted cells appear to have been attacked by the protein aggregates that cause tragic degenerative disease, according to the study published in the April issue of Nature Medicine Sunday.
Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City and Rush University Medical Center in Chicago studied brain tissue from a patient who received a dopamine transplant 14 years ago and found that the transplanted cells developed changes characteristic of Parkinson’s disease.
Post-mortems of three individuals with the grafts found evidence that so-called Lewy bodies — the protein that accumulates in the substantia nigra and kills dopamine cells — had spread to the implanted cells.
The disease is an ongoing process that continually causes damage, researchers explained.
Cell transplants have been shown to help some patients in previous studies, but there has no report of long-term effectiveness, researchers said.
“Our results suggest that grafted cells can be affected by the disease process and thereby might limit the long-term clinical benefit of these treatment approaches,” said the study.
Parkinson’s is an incurable disease of the central nervous system that causes uncontrollable shaking, slowed mobility and poor balance, along with impaired speech.