What are the therapeutic uses of stem cells? What are the risks of stem cell therapies? What are the benefits of the stem cell therapies?

For the last 30 years, steam cells have been treated by bone marrow, and more recently, umbilical cord blood stem cells. These treatments have resulted very effective in oncology patients with leukemia and lymphoma. The benefits of this treatment are that during chemotherapy, the growing cells are killed by the cytotoxic agents that contain the chemo. These agents cannot differentiate the leukemia or neoplastic cells, and the hematopoietic cells within the bone marrow. The treatment of the steam cells take care of this side effect of the chemotherapy, the donor´s healthy bone marrow gives the body the new stem cells that the body have lost during treatment.

The potential treatments are within: spinal cord injuries, brain damage, cancer, heart damage, baldness, deafness, blindness, neuronal and behavioral birth defects, diabetes, within others.

Risks of having a stem cells treatment:

The first risk is having an infection. After the transplant of these cells, the body has a very low immune system until it recovers, so viruses and bacterias can appear very easy. This recover can take several weeks.

Bleeding problems from the low level of platelets-

 'graft versus host disease'. This is how is called when the donor cells do not match with the patient cells. This have not major risk unless is not well treated.

Rarely, the transplanted stem cells fail to work.