Georgia Injury Law Blog
Patients who have suffered a spinal cord personal injury in an auto accident may experience some improvement in their symptoms with the help of stem cell therapy using cells from their own fat.
Those findings come from a new study conducted by researchers at the Mayo Clinic. The findings of the study were published in the journal Nature Communications. The study was conducted on 10 patients who had suffered a spinal cord personal injury. The researchers found in the study that the patients were able to recover some degree of sensation and movement in the areas affected by their spinal injury.
The researchers extracted stem cells from fat from the patients’ thigh and abdomen areas. They expanded these stem cells to 100 million cells which were then injected into the affected areas. The researchers found that 7 out of the 10 patients showed improvement in their symptoms, including two out of three patients who had zero or minimal sensation below the site of their spinal cord injury. Typically, only 5% of such patients manage to recover any kind of sensation or movement in their affected areas. Moreover, the researchers say that there were no significant side effects as a result of the stem cell therapy.