Sitting in a deep-sea diving tank, combined with injections of your own stem cells, has emerged as a possible new treatment for type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the condition. This is according to a trial at Miami University, which found that patients were able to stop using insulin or metformin after a combination of bone-marrow stem cell injections in the pancreas, and five one-hour sessions of hyperbaric oxygen treatment.
According to the scientists, who published their work in the journal Cell Transplantation, the combination of stem cell therapy and hyperbaric oxygen treatment improves patients’ wellbeing, because the high levels of oxygen in the chamber boosts the activity of the stem cells. This helped the stem cells to repair the cells in the body that produce insulin, which thereby guards your wellness against the need for diabetes medications, such as insulin and metformin.
The new treatment is being investigated at a number of centres across the world. It involves extracting stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow under local anaesthetic and injecting them into the pancreas, after which the patient sits in a highly pressurised chamber, causing them to breathe in three times as much oxygen as they would normally. Hyperbaric oxygen treatment is currently used to help divers who have surfaced too quickly and have the ‘bends’ (where bubbles of nitrogen form in the blood).
For the Miami trial, 25 patients, who were taking either metformin, insulin or both, had five hour-long sessions of hyperbaric oxygen treatment before and after the injections, over the course of a week. The results were that four patients were able to stop using their insulin after the combined treatment, whilst another fifteen could gradually reduce their insulin over the following year. When it came to metformin, ten participants were also able to stopped or reduce their dose.
Dr Matthew Hobbs, Head of Research at Diabetes UK, commented on the use of stem cells in diabetes research: ‘Although any stem cell therapies for type 1 and type 2 diabetes are many years away from widespread clinical use, researchers agree that stem cells hold great potential to treat and perhaps even cure a range of different health conditions. Stem cell research is an exciting area of science that, in the long term, could help us bring about a future without diabetes.’
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