The benefits of stem cell therapy are becoming more well-known and publicised by the day, but there are a number of conditions that have not been considered good candidates for treatment. While autoimmune disorders and degenerative diseases are easily targeted for stem cell use, conditions such as psychological disorders have been largely overlooked.
However, as conditions of psychiatric become better researched, it’s starting to become apparent that there are physical effects in the body that are affecting the brain to cause these disorders, and they can possibly be treated naturally through stem cell therapy.
What is mesenchymal stem cell?
Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are primal or “undifferentiated” cells. They are essentially “blank” and have the ability to become almost any other type of cell. In the body, their function is to find damaged or diseased tissue and repair or replace it. We all have a supply of stem cells when we’re born, but it decreases with time, and their effectiveness diminishes with age.
A stem cell transplant seeks to boost the body’s number of stem cells by the hundreds of millions. Through the use of donated cord tissue-derived stem cells, the cells used in treatment are “brand new”, with the highest potency and healing potential. Additionally, the treatment involves only natural cell products, avoiding the use of potentially harmful additives and drugs.
Stem cells can be characterized by two fundamental qualities:
first, they have the capacity for unlimited self-renewal, and second, they can produce at least one type of highly differentiated descendants. This particular cell division is termed “asymmetrical”: in general, each stem cell division gives rise to one stem and one committed somatic daughter cell.
Stem cells are single cells that, once developed, self -renew for the lifetime of the organism. These stem cells should be distinguished from transient progenitor cells, which have a limited self-renewal lifespan Some steps earlier during the embryonic period, cells become gradually restricted to distinct pathways of differentiation. This process includes modification of their developmental potential; they become pluripotent (“many, several”). The major difference between totipotency and pluripotency is that an embryonic stem cell (ES cell) which is by definition “pluripotent,” can only form cells which constitute the embryo itself but not the placenta.
Early ES cells can be taken from the embryo and grown in vitro. When retransferred into the embryo, these cells can still generate all tissues, including the germ line. ES cells also play a central role in the generation of transgenic animals such as knockout mice.
How Stem Cell therapy works?
Stem-cell maintenance and generation take place in a distinct microenvironment where appropriate external signals can best exert their regulatory function on these cells. Signals provided by neural growth factors are responsible for neural stem-cell growth. Since components of regular stem-cell maintenance like brain-derived neurotrophic factor are also implicated in mechanistic model’s characteristic of mood disorders, they thus offer new targets for pharmacologic intervention in neuropsychiatry disease.
More thorough knowledge about this complex connection may help us render antidepressant treatment more efficient and reduce the undesirable side effects that impair patient compliance.
So far there is no particular stem-cell-based approach really on the horizon for treating mental disorder or any other psychosis.