Posted on 04/21/2008 4:30:27 PM PDT by Ultra Sonic 007
Dallas Hextell was already a miracle to parents Cynthia and Derak, after they spent three years trying to get pregnant.
But now he is looking like a medical miracle to the rest of the world.
The 2-year-old son of the Sacramento, Calif., couple was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, but is now showing fewer signs of the disorder and marked improvement after an infusion of his own stem cells — made possible by the preservation of his own cord blood shortly before birth.
Derak Hextell now believes his son will be cured of the incurable malady.
“[Dallas’ doctors] said by the age of 7, there may be no signs of cerebral palsy at all,” Hextell told TODAY co-host Meredith Vieira while holding a curious Dallas on his lap. “So he’s on his way, as far as we’re concerned.”
For Cynthia Hextell, the changes in Dallas just five days after the intravenous infusion of his cord blood cells are not coincidental.
“[He’s changed] almost in every way you can imagine, just from five days afterwards saying ‘mama’ and waving,” she said. “We just feel like right now he really connects with you.
“It just seemed like a fog was over him before, like he just really wasn’t there. There was kind of, like a glaze in his eyes. Now, as you can see, you can’t get anything past him.”
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
A month old, but I think this story is worth.
Yet the Culture of Death continues onward on the march for embryonic stem cells...
Ping of definite interest!
Another blow to the Culture of Death.
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Thank you for posting this. I have an 11 year old daughter with CP.
She’s managing with it, but life would be easier without it. She’s always had speech and coordination problems, but a few months ago she had a grand mal seizure so we are now also dealing with seizures.
It would be nice if there was a cure.
They got pregnant? I thought only females got pregnant.
The 2-year-old son of the Sacramento, Calif., couple was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, but is now showing fewer signs of the disorder and marked improvement after an infusion of his own stem cells — made possible by the preservation of his own cord blood shortly before birth.
That's a pretty good trick getting the cord blood before the kid was born. It's a great story. I guess the editor was on vacation.
Aparrently Duke has been doing quite a bit with adult stem cell treatments such as this cord blood infusion ... here’s an earlier article
http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/05/cordblood.html
Here’s an interesting tidbit from the article I linked to:
**************************************
Finally, cord blood cells are less mature than adult bone marrow cells and thus do not need to perfectly match the patient’s immune-related blood proteins, called antigens, said Kurtzberg. Only four of six cord blood “antigens” must match for a transplant to have a reasonable chance of success, whereas adult bone marrow requires a greater degree of matching antigens, she said.
**************************************
Makes you want to get into the cord blood business... adult stem cells that aren’t adult enough to require an exact match! Damn that’s exciting.
stem cell ping
Well there ya' go. As long as his mom believes it. /s
!
If you watched the video you would see that the changes in the child were amazing ,, you just don’t recover from CP ,, that NEVER happens, what does happen is that it gets progressively worse as the unused/inaccessible parts of the brain die off which affects other sections that interconnect and rely on the damaged information processing sectors ... exactly what was repaired we will never know exactly because of our lack of knowledge of the brain but it appears likely that some small part or interconnect was made whole and that it was early enough that the previously disconnected areas were still functioning at some level. The best we can get is before and after MRI imaging from a modern 64 slice machine to see where activity has increased.
CP does not get progressively worse.
Also, the parts of the brain can be trained to do much.
My daughter’s abilities have only gotten better as she has gotten older.
At 5, she couldn’t talk. At 11, she can talk, she is reading at her age level, spelling above grade level, gifted at math, etc.
Her coordination has improved, but it has taken lots of work. For example when learning a new word, she has to practice it about 20 times correctly before it will get put into motor memory. It’s about 20 times more than a regular kid.
Now maybe a child with severe CP who is in a wheelchair will have muscles that get apathy because of inuse, but I would imagine a good physical therapist could help with that.
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