Stem cell therapy is a type of cell therapy wherein cells are introduced into the damaged tissue so as to treat the disorder or the injury. There are a number of medical researchers who believes that the stem cell therapy has the potential to change the treatment of human diseases and reduce the suffering people face when they have a disease. They believe that there are a lot of potential to replace the damaged and diseased tissues in the body without getting the risk of rejections.
The stem cells have the ability to self-renew and also give rise to further generation of cells that can multiply. There are a number of stem cell therapies that do exist but most of them are still in the experimental stages. The treatments are very costly with an exception of bone marrow transplant. However, researchers believe that one day they will be able to develop technologies from embryonic stem cells and also adult stem cells to cure type I diabetes, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, cardiac failure, neurological disorders and many more such ailments.
The stem cell therapy however carries its own pros and cons and like any other therapy it cannot be said that the stem cell therapy is an advantageous package. Here are some of the pros and cons of the therapy.
Pros of the stem cell therapy include:
• It offers a lot of medical benefits in the therapeutic sectors of regenerative medicine and cloning.
• It shows great potential in the treatment of a number of conditions like Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injuries, Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, cancer, diabetes and many others.
• It helps the researchers know more about the growth of human cells and their development.
• In future, the stem cell research can allow the scientists to test a number of potential medicines and drugs without carrying out any test on animals and humans. The drug can be tested on a population of cells directly.
• The stem cell therapy also allows researchers to study the developmental stages that cannot be known directly through the human embryo and can be used in the treatment of a number of birth defects, infertility problems and also pregnancy loss. A higher understanding will allow the treatment of the abnormal development in the human body.
• The stem cell therapy puts into use the cells of the patient’s own body and hence the risk of rejection can be reduced because the cells belong to the same human body.
The cons of the stem cell therapy include the following:
• The use of the stem cells for research involves the destruction of the blastocytes that are formed from the laboratory fertilization of the human egg.
• The long term side effects of the therapy are still unknown.
• The disadvantage of adult stem cells is that the cells of a particular origin would generate cells only of that type, like brain cells would generate only brain cells and so on.
• If the cells used in the therapy are embryonic then the disadvantage is that the cells will not be from the same human body and there are chances of rejection.
The stem cell therapy is still under the process of research and there are a number of things that needs to be established before it used as a treatment line.