Stem Cells and Autoimmune Diseases: A New Hope for Treatment

Greetings to my favorite science community StemSocial,

I'm glad to be back to continue my series on Stem Cell therapy and all the medical advancements made with our progress in Stem Cell research.

In today's blog post we'll briefly discuss how Stem Cell research is becoming a new hope for treatment of Autoimmune diseases.

Original Image Source by geralt from Pixabay

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In a simple man's way of explaining Autoimmune diseases, it's basically a conditions where your own immune system goes super rogue and attacks your body instead of doing its job.

It's basically like having a corrupt cop or police officer. Instead of protecting the citizens, they assault them.

These Autoimmune conditions include diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, and even type 1 diabetes. Autoimmune diseases like these can be pretty tough to handle.

There are treatments that doctors and medical scientists have developed to hopefully combat this condition but the issue is that they come with other side effects. Some side effects can even end with worse ramifications than the disease we're trying to cure.

Some of these traditional treatments Doctors use include steroids and some immune-suppressing drugs.

Now here's the good news - once again Stem Cell therapy has the potential of handling these Autoimmune diseases without the side effects that these traditional treatments mentioned above brings to the body.

Stem cell-based immunotherapy is really stepping into the scene and offering a promising way to effectively deal with autoimmune diseases without the downsides of traditional treatments.

Now let's begin by discussing what these Autoimmune diseases are

Understanding Autoimmune Diseases

Now first things first guys, the big question is what are autoimmune diseases all about?

Well, these life threatening diseases happens when your immune system, which as you may know is supposed to defend you against harmful stuff like bacteria and viruses, gets seemingly confused and starts attacking your healthy cells and tissues.

This almost sounds like what might happen between Artificial Intelligence and Humans. What is meant to protect is destroying.

This complete mix-up leads to inflammation and a bunch of not-so-fun symptoms, well depending on the specific disease that is caused by the immune system acting up.

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Challenges of Traditional Treatment

So, what have the scientists and doctors been doing to tackle these autoimmune diseases?

Well at the moment it's mostly about managing and suppressing the immune system's malfunction.
Doctors have mostly been using treatments that try to calm down the immune system's overzealous attack on your own body.

However there are limitations and side effects

Side Effects

These treatments can have some pretty unpleasant side effects on the patients. One serious issue is when the patient uses these drugs in the long run

Long-term use of immune-suppressing drugs can make you even more prone to infections and mess with your bone health. So by trying to fix a problem, you end up creating much worse ones.

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Partial Relief

These traditional treatments don't always work as perfectly as you may think. Some patients on these traditional drugs, steroids or treatments still have to deal with some ongoing discomfort and disruption in their lives.

It's almost like having a disease that comes and goes. I believe that's not an ideal treatment for a healthy life.

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Disease Keeps Getting Worse

Even under these treatments, sometimes the diseases keep getting worse which cause more damage to your tissues and organs. The patient under the treatment would seem to be deteriorating in health.

It could get to a point where the drugs or treatments even look like it's not effective in the patient.

Stem Cell-Based Immunotherapy

Now let's briefly discuss how Stem Cell-Based Immunotherapy can become a game changer in the effective treatment of Autoimmune diseases.

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Stem Cells

Now if you've been following my series on Stem Cells, I'v repeatedly discussed the two types of stem cells; the embryonic Stem Cells and the Adult Stem Cells

Doctors use various types of stem cells, like the ones extracted from embryos or induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) which is basically extracting the adult stem cells and converting them into Embryonic stem cells due to the unethical concerns of directly extracting the embryonic stem cells from patients.

Now the type of Stem cell the doctors will use depends on what disease they're trying to treat and what they want to achieve.

Saving the Immune System

These stem cells have the unique capabilities of calming down your immune response, making it basically play nice again. The idea is to calm the immune system down to go back to the normal state of protecting the body and not fighting it.

Tissue Repair

The one powerful trait of Stem cells that makes it super versatile in solving a lot of medical issues is its ability to specialize into different types of cells.

A stem cell has the ability to turn into a heart cells or liver cell or kidney cell.

So in the case where a patient has damage heart muscles, doctors can infuse stem cells into the body and the stem cells travel to the region of damage and do the regenerative task of repairing the damaged heart muscles and replacing dead cells.

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There are a lot of awesome and innovative things doctors and scientists intend to do with the knowledge of Stem Cell research.

They're looking into using stem cells to grow back the insulin-making cells in your pancreas. That's starting to sound like a potential cure to diabetes right?

Stem cell transplantation is showing promise and prospect in stopping multiple sclerosis from getting worse and even going so far as to reverse some of the damage it's done to your nerves.

To draw the curtains on my blog post today, it's without a doubt that there's a whole world of possibilities and big positive changes that Stem Cells can bring to our lives.

The number of medical issues it can handle and effectively solve will baffle and amaze you. Indeed Stem Cell Therapy is a new hope for treatment.

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As I end my blog post I would like to say thank you for taking the time to read the blog. As always I'm open for any question or comment you may have regarding today's blog post.

Have a lovely day and catch you next time on StemSocial. Goodbye ❤️

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