Muscular Dystrophy(MD)
by Drs.Like Wu, Xiaojuan Wang, Bo Cheng, Susan Chu and Shengjie Liu
Wu Medical Center, Bejing, China
Progressive muscular dystrophy (PMD) is a group of hereditary, progressive skeletal muscle degenerative disease, pathology characteristic by skeletal muscle fiber degeneration and necrotic. As the disease progresses, the damage caused to the central axis, mitochondria, and central nucleus of the muscle cells leads the muscle cells to die away, resulting in a pathological process where muscles cells decrease while fat cells and fiber cells proliferate.
Major clinical manifestations are slowly progressing the muscular dystrophy and muscular weakness; Cardiac muscle atrophy and Skeletal muscle atrophy occurs in part types. Different gene defects result in a different onset time: early to fetus period or after adult stage.
According to different clinical manifestations or gene defects, clinical classifications are Congenital muscular dystrophy; Duchenne muscular dystrophy, DMD; Becker's muscular dystrophy, BMD; Limb-girdle muscular dystrophy and so on. DMD and BMD are the most common clinical types. From the name we can know that muscular dystrophy is progressive, but the speed of the diseases progress is different.
Most of MD(muscular dystrophy) patients have poor prognosis, muscle paralysis and atrophy may cause patient to be disabled or/and have organ failure. Conventional medication treatment includes the symptomatic treatment, supportive treatment and rehabilitation training, which can maintain and prolong the time of independent ambulation of patient. But these treatments cannot stop the diseases progress because these conventional medication treatments can neither reduce the speed of muscle fiber damage degeneration, nor newly increase the number of muscle fiber. So there has been lack of specific treatment for this kind of progressive muscular dystrophy.
In Wu Stem Cells Medical Center (WMC) during the last 10 years, a special treatment with 2 types of stem cells (mesenchymal stem cell + nerve stem cells) implanted at the same time and assisted with CAST therapy has been shown to be able to slow down or stop the disease (muscular dystrophy) from progressing, increase muscle power, alleviate muscle rigidity, prevent scoliosis, increase muscle mass, etc.. As for patients at late stage, the treatment can also reduce respiratory failure happening. The treatment also show positive effects for patients with respiratory failure and completely wheelchair dependent.
Treatment mechanism:
In order for the implanted mesenchymal stem cells to differentiate into muscle cells and muscle fiber cells, nerve stem cells are used to secrete multiple neurotrophic factors as a support, while CAST therapy is used to reduce the pathological environment of the muscle tissues, which is very important for the stem cells to express their functions. These newly regenerated muscle cells and muscle fiber cells can replace the diseased cells to function as normal. Since they do not have genetic defects, the normal central nucleus and mitochondria in there can produce normal protein groups, such as dystrophin, which are beneficial for muscle function recovery. This treatment not only can slow down the disease progression, but also can gradually restore patient’s muscle movement function, making it the most promising treatment at present.
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