Patients suffering from severe lupus have experienced improvement when injected with blood stem cells from their own bone marrow, according to a study published in the United States.
Of the patients with life-threatening lupus who received the treatment, 50% were disease free five years afterward, said the study published in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study was launched in 1997 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago and ran until January 2005 for lupus patients that had exhausted all available treatments.
Patients first underwent chemotherapy to ”virtually” destroy tainted immune systems. Then stem cells harvested from the patients’ own bone marrow were returned to repopulate the marrow and body ”in an effort to regenerate a healthy immune sysytem”, the study said.
Based on the encouraging results, researchers plan to conduct a more definitive test that will compare stem cell transplant patients with those given standard lupus treatment.
Mainly affecting women of child-bearing age, lupus is a disease in which the body’s immune system attacks its own organs and tissues. Its symptoms range through unexplained fever, swollen joints, skin rashes and severe damage of the kidneys, lungs or central nervous system.
Conventional treatment has proved effective for most lupus victims but researchers said the new stem cell approach held out hope for those suffering from more severe forms of the disease.
Walter Barr, a rheumatologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and professor of medicine at Northwestern University, said ”for the very severely ill subset of lupus patients who have failed conventional therapies, stem cell transplantation provides a promising new alternative”.
A similar study was conducted by European researchers in 2004 with similar results except the mortality rate related to the transplant treatment was at 13%. The mortality rate for the US study was two percent, the authors wrote.
Of the 1,5-million people in the United States who have lupus, five percent have a life-threatening form of the disease that is resistant to standard treatment. – Sapa-AFP