[HN Gopher] Japanese scientists use stem cell treatment to resto...
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Japanese scientists use stem cell treatment to restore movement in
spinal injury
Author : pseudolus
Score : 217 points
Date : 2025-03-24 10:25 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medicalxpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medicalxpress.com)
| pseudolus wrote:
| Some more details from the general press:
| https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20250321_21/
| lambdaone wrote:
| and here: https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-
| asia/article/3303473/jap...
| hash872 wrote:
| So are stem cells a 'real' thing now? I can never tell, and I'm
| not sure that I trust a website called 'medicalxpress' (which has
| a nag screen that ominously warns me about the 'consequences' of
| my using an adblocker).
|
| I have torn shoulder labrum that I've been living with for 8ish
| years now. It doesn't affect me enough to need surgery, but given
| the option I'd love to fix it without having to go under the
| knife. I sporadically hear about stem cell injections as a
| possible fix, and as a sports fan there are always stories about
| athletes using stem cells to repair serious injuries. Sometimes
| these stories involve the athletes traveling to another country
| (Germany, Thailand, Mexico, somewhere) where stem cell treatments
| are legal outside of the FDA's bureaucratic purview. (The FDA has
| been working on authorizing European sunscreen for the last 25
| years, BTW). The UFC now advertises a Mexican stem cell clinic. I
| asked my ortho last year about them and she said 'maybe!', which
| I suppose is better than 'no they're a total fraud'. Are these
| claims even approaching reality? Is the science of stem cells
| getting closer at all?
| bix6 wrote:
| Marc Benioff said UCSF used Yamanaka's techniques to regrow his
| Achilles in place. So it seems that we are getting there.
| hash872 wrote:
| Unfortunately my disposable income to spend on experimental
| medical treatments is slightly less than Marc Benioff's :(
| bix6 wrote:
| If only we could all be so rich. Have you looked into PRP?
| My neighbor got an injection for his shoulder, $3k here,
| although apparently you can find it for way less.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I had PRP done in 2008 for $1K and it healed a 8 year old
| persistent knee injury within 3 months.
|
| That said I'm not sure if it's necessarily the stem cells
| that did the healing or just the general irritation of
| the area that reminds the body that it might want to
| reexamine healing that specific area. I believe the
| French were injecting irritants in the 90s (forgot what
| chemical it was). Because PRP is injecting something
| sourced from your own body it can skip many regularity
| steps that would be required by some other chemical. I
| don't know how much of PRP is simply a low regulation
| irritant and how much of it is stem cells, my guess it's
| more the former than the latter.
|
| Edit; Googling it now: Prolotherapy which has a long rich
| history, modern PRP alternatives seem to be salt and or
| sugar water based. Seems like some studies suggest there
| isn't much difference in outcomes between salt water
| injections and PRP injections.
|
| Addendum; it was one of the most painful surgeries I've
| done, I'm anesthetic resistant and they used basically
| none off it. An ultrasound was used for guiding the
| needle. The injury location was in the back of the knee
| and they wanted to be careful they didn't inject into a
| nerve. When asked how would they know if they hit a
| nerve, they responded "your screams of pain will go up an
| octave". They did hit a nerve and I let them know it.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Be careful with anecdotes. The history of stem cell
| treatments is full of promising claims that later failed to
| differentiate from standard treatments.
|
| A common technique in the past was to use stem cell therapy
| on a lot of candidate patients who had some chance of
| recovering normally. When some subset recovered normally,
| they would champion them as stem cell success stories.
|
| It's an interesting field, but anecdotes are not the right
| way to look at it. Even when they come from famous figures.
| Nursie wrote:
| > So are stem cells a 'real' thing now?
|
| Always were a real possibility and under active research but
| the unregulated treatments you read about in Mexico, Thailand
| etc were probably snake-oil rather than targeted, effective
| medicine.
|
| The unregulated stuff has alway seemed to involve just
| injecting some sort of stem-cell milkshake into the affected
| area and hoping it does something useful. The attached article
| describes a more involved process.
|
| Both things can be true - those clinics are doing bullshit
| medicine, and stem-cell treatments can maybe be made to work.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The question is whether this "more involved process" builds
| upon experience from the first years of almost-quackery. It
| wouldn't be the first time in healthcare.
|
| People have eyes, observe their results and adapt.
| Nursie wrote:
| Seems unlikely, far more likely that it has built upon the
| history of actual research, than the exploitative practices
| of those clinics that latch on and sell snake-oil.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| People move around, including doctors. Even knowing what
| _doesn 't_ work can help future patients.
|
| For an example, most of urgent medicine (e.g.
| battlefields) in history was built on this sort of
| chaotic progress, and not on meticulous scientific
| research.
| Nursie wrote:
| It's not progress if it's just exploiting something
| people associate with high-tech medical magic, but that
| isn't contributing to the literature or sum of human
| knowledge, merely to the bank-accounts of the cowboys
| running the show.
|
| Why are you so keen to attribute scientific breakthroughs
| to ... well to quacks? On the one hand we have bona-fide
| research by people understanding the science, using
| animal models to test and understand, building up sound
| scientific basis for treatment etc, and on the other we
| have people injecting god knows what into anyone with
| enough money, some of it human-origin, some of it not,
| very unlikely to be contributing to any corpus of
| knowledge, all because rubes heard "stem cells" on the
| news and think they're magic.
|
| These are not serious doctors working on breakthroughs by
| disregarding the stuffy old rules that hold them back
| (though that's certainly one way they like to sell
| themselves), they're quacks selling bullshit and scamming
| people.
| janderson215 wrote:
| I would argue it's only cowboys participating because the
| FDA has effectively told everybody the only way to play
| by the rules is by spending large sums of time and money
| which gate-keeps new entrants and stifles progress and
| contribution to the sum of human knowledge.
|
| The bar can be lowered without allowing snake oil and
| holding snake oil salesman accountable, granted this is
| much harder to do when people travel internationally. At
| that point, the consumer owns the risk they are taking,
| regardless of how precarious the situation is.
|
| This is an over-regulated industry that has been captured
| by existing entities who would rather pay the exorbitant
| fees for incredible returns than allow new entrants to
| the market.
| caycep wrote:
| iPS cells in vitro for experiments have been a thing for over
| a decade now...
|
| In vivo experiments face more regulations bc...well, stem
| cells are very close to cancer cells and bad things have
| happened....
| nwienert wrote:
| Can also be true that those clinics work, based on my
| research I believe the more reputable ones do.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| Medicalxpress is a subsidiary of the more known
| https://phys.org/ which is a decades-old aggregator of
| published material containing innovative studies and
| engineering techniques. They write their own summaries in an
| AP/Reuters style but with more quantified detail and less
| exaggeration than the usual pop media and university PR pieces.
| A bit like Quanta Magazine, great for keeping tabs on new
| findings with clear and consistent hyperlinks to the source
| material.
| sirolimus wrote:
| Medicalexpress is a reputable medical news website. Regarding
| the adblocker, how else would u earn money.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| The FDA doesn't even go over domestic supplements. Most
| domestic supplements don't even contain the stated ingredients
| and many contain illegal ingredients.
|
| Something like 25 years to authorize European sunscreen looks
| like a corrupt move. Some business interest definitely is
| influencing it to make it happen.
|
| >Are these claims even approaching reality? Is the science of
| stem cells getting closer at all?
|
| I've heard many many anecdotal claims of this working. We'll
| have to see.
| caycep wrote:
| You'd think a technical site like ycombinator, ppl would post
| directly from pubmed/europe pmc...I mean, ppl post CS papers
| from Arxiv regularly...
| bragr wrote:
| I think in practice most papers are too technical to be
| meaningfully read by people outside the field. I struggle
| with some CS papers especially depending subfield. I could
| probably get through this stem cell paper if I had 8 hours
| and a medical reference dictionary, and it still would
| probably involve several side quests reading up on related
| topics and citations before I could meaningfully deliver an
| opinion. That makes these science reporting sites a necessary
| evil IMHO.
| carabiner wrote:
| I had type 2 SLAP tear (lemme guess, rock climbing?) confirmed
| by MRI with dye. It seemed to just... go asymptomatic after
| months of rest, gradual return to activity. Some guy on reddit
| said stem cells from mexico fixed his SLAP tear but he never
| went for a followup MRI so who knows.
| hash872 wrote:
| BJJ. Good luck, but just so you know- SLAP tears don't heal
| on their own. There's not enough bloodflow to the area, and
| the actual physical substance of the labrum for the both of
| us has been ripped apart. It may or may not bother you (mine
| doesn't 80% of the time), but it also never heals. So you're
| at risk of tearing it further, which then becomes a Big Deal.
| I stopped doing BJJ for this reason
| carabiner wrote:
| I'm well aware of all of that after multiple consultations
| with my surgeon.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I have some hope that, among the assorted mayhem, the Trump
| administration makes the FDA a bit more permissive.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Given RFK needs HGH and steroids to stay alive I think they
| will unregulate everything but the truth
| bitwize wrote:
| Using IPSCs to regrow tissue, including nerve and connective
| tissue that just doesn't heal on its own, is definitely a thing
| that's about to happen. There have been promising clinical
| trials, and the techniques probably need to be refined to where
| they can be done safely at scale. But they're coming.
|
| These wildcat stem cell clinics in Central and South America
| promoted by bodybuilders, UFC people, and other athletes --
| most of them are scams. The scammy ones inject stem cells at
| the site and sort of hope they do the right thing. Sometimes
| they do the wrong thing, and develop into cancer! Be aware that
| insurance, or your country's nationalized health care program,
| usually does not cover these clinics, and you will at best be
| paying tens of thousands of dollars out of your own pocket for
| a stem cell therapy that is at best highly experimental and may
| not have the effects you want. They operate Stateside too, my
| wife and I were approached by one. We took the free dinner and
| then noped out.
|
| But hey, your body, your choice. If it were me, I'd wait a bit
| for something that's a bit more proven, unless I were
| critically injured or ill. But it is coming, and it won't be
| long now.
| caycep wrote:
| The easy way to tell:
|
| If the clinic is charging you to get stem cell therapy -
| probably a scam
|
| If the clinic is paying you to get stem cell therapy (most
| clinical trials include a stipend for study participants),
| and there's a legit entry on clinicaltrails.gov - likely
| legit.
| Forbo wrote:
| I wonder what this would cost to have done. I have a relative
| that was left paralyzed after a spinal cord injury, would love
| for them to be able to try something like this.
|
| Edit: looks like it has to be a pretty recent injury... "14-28
| days prior"
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Potentially this technique can be improved to include longer
| period injuries, it's a good development.
| johnisgood wrote:
| So, perhaps not for MS, then, either, if one has had mobility
| issues for years. :(
| lambdaone wrote:
| This seems to be the research group involved:
|
| https://www.med.keio.ac.jp/gcoe-stemcell/english/member/okan...
| stared wrote:
| Such operations have a history - the first successful one was
| carried in 2014 in Poland:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/health-29645760
| caycep wrote:
| Also, I'm pretty sure U Mich had a trial to do implants in ALS
| patients, but not sure if it ever got beyond Phase I
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Why can't I upvote this topic? The only option is "flag" (and
| hide and favorite)
| meltyness wrote:
| Usually indicates that you already have, you can check your
| history in your profile.
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