Stamcellen: biologie en mogelijke toepassing bij het hartinfarct

- If the heart fails to recover sufficient functionality following an infarct, then heart failure develops, an important cause of death in the western world.

- One obvious therapy is to create more muscle tissue to supplement the damaged myocardium with new functional contractile cells, together with neovasculogenesis.

- Stem cells repair recipient tissue by differentiating into tissue-specific cells or by creating an environment that stimulates the process of repair by the body's own cells at the site.

- In animal studies the heart function stabilised following an injection of stem cells in the infarcted area.

- In 3 non-randomised trials in humans, bone marrow stem cells were injected via the infarcted artery or round the infarcted area; the results indicated an improved heart function.

- There is currently still insufficient fundamental knowledge about the behaviour of multipotent cells, about the effects of using them for treatment, and about their long-term risk for these cells to be employed in the treatment of patients with a heart infarct.