Stem cell therapies could help reduce the death rate from heart disease.
New research suggests the therapy could complement other heart disease treatments, a Wiley news release reported.
The therapy involves removing stem cells from a patient's bone marrow and injecting them into the heart.
The research team looked at "1,255 people from 23 [randomized] controlled trials," the news release reported. All of these patients had received standard treatment. The researchers found those who used stem cell therapies (instead of a placebo) had a lower risk of being readmitted to the hospital and a overall better heart function.
Future studies will help researchers confirm this finding.
"This is encouraging evidence that stem cell therapy has benefits for heart disease patients. However, it is generated from small studies and it is difficult to come to any concrete conclusions until larger clinical trials that look at longer- term effects are carried out," Doctor Enca Martin-Rendon, author of the review, Cochrane Heart Review Group, and based at NHS Blood and Transplant and the University of Oxford, said in the news release.
Stem cell therapies are currently only offered in facilities that are conducting medical research. If the study's findings prove to be founded the method could be used along with other treatments to improve cases of chronic heart disease.
Over the first year of the study no benefits in stem cell therapy were detected over standard treatments; after the first year only three percent of the patients treated with stem cells had passed away compared with 15 percent in the control group. Hospital readmission was also compared reduced to two in every 100 people when compared with nine in the control group.
"It isn't clear which types of stem cells work best or why stem cell therapies seem to work for some people but not for others. We need to find out what's different in the people who aren't responding well to these treatments as it might then be possible to tailor therapies to these patients, so that they work better," Martin-Rendon said.
"This review should help to raise awareness of the potential of stem cell therapy to improve patient outcomes, but it also demonstrates the importance of [recognizing] the uncertainty of initial findings and the need for further research. A Cochrane review aims to [analyze] all available data to give a clear picture of what the evidence shows. Ensuring health decision makers, health professionals and the general public has access to up-to-date, relevant evidence research will help to raise awareness of the effectiveness of treatments and medications and therefore improve health care," Doctor David Tovey, Editor-in-Chief, Cochrane said in the news release.
