Manage Your Chronic Pain with Stem Cell Therapy
Chronic pain is pain that lasts longer than 12 weeks. While everyone has aches and pains from time to time, a 2010 study estimates that about 30% of Americans have chronic pain. This is why it’s so important to understand your chronic pain treatment options.
What Causes Chronic Pain, and How Is It Diagnosed?
There are many different conditions that can cause chronic pain, such as:
injuries like broken bones or sprains and strains
infections
surgeries
diseases that cause inflammation, like arthritis (joint inflammation) and tendonitis (inflammation of the tendons)
conditions that cause nerve damage, like fibromyalgia (which causes muscle pain)
Overweight or obese people have a higher risk of chronic pain. Besides discomfort, chronic pain may also cause symptoms like fatigue, mood changes, and insomnia.
Since pain is subjective, diagnosing your pain will require asking questions about your pain, using imaging tests like x-rays and CT scans to search for conditions that may be causing the pain, and electrode machines to identify muscle or nerve issues.
How Can Mesenchymal Stem Cells Regenerate My Hip Tissue?
Injured cells in your skin, bones, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and connective joints send out signals; MSCs respond to those signals, migrate to the injured tissue, and release proteins that stimulate your own cells to begin regenerating.
Common chronic pain regions, that are treated with stem cell therapy, include the joints, back, and neck. Stem cells have powerful anti-inflammatory effects, which also help reduce pain in conditions like tendonitis.
How Is Stem Cell Therapy Administered?
Regardless of where your chronic pain is, your regenerative specialist will most likely use x-rays to help pinpoint the regions that require regeneration. He or she will also clean and numb your skin to reduce infection and prevent any discomfort.
Once injected, the stem cells will release growth factors, cytokines, and chemokines which then may:
activate T-cells to secrete proteins
open up your blood vessels and form new ones
move cells out of your blood vessels and into the tissues surrounding them
stimulate your cells to regenerate your tissue
inhibit your inflammation
regulate your immune system
As with all medical procedures, success rates of stem cell therapy will vary depending on your age, body type, genetics, injury severity, stress levels, and other environmental factors.
Where Do Live Stem Cells Come From?
Liveyon processes the umbilical cord blood of healthy newborns. If a pregnant woman scheduled for caesarean section decides that she does not want to keep and store her unborn child’s umbilical cord, she can sign an informed consent form and undergo a medical and social history review, along with a blood test. The new mother can be accepted as a donor if she meets all donor eligibility requirements.
The umbilical cord blood is collected in a sterile bag, sent to a lab, and then processed within 48 hours using proprietary methods. A sample of the finished product is tested by an independent third-party lab for sterility. Only after all lab reports have passed the regulatory requirements can the umbilical cord stem cells be distributed.
Are Umbilical Cord Stem Cells FDA Approved?
The FDA recently confirmed there is only one registered and approved stem cell product on the market: umbilical cord blood-derived hematopoietic progenitor cells (blood-forming stem cells) used for certain indications. While there is enormous promise in stem cell therapies, and thousands of ongoing experiments trying to establish efficacy, stem cell treatments do not yet meet the FDA’s scientific approval standard.
Practitioners tapping into this enormous promise of stem cells for any therapeutic use must exercise their professional judgment and expertise. We urge anyone embarking on the use of stem cell therapies to consult the national health databases to evaluate current clinical trial information, and the FDA’s website on human tissue to get its current therapy evaluations.
In 2018 the FDA’s commissioner and research director reported that the agency will be incorporating some “new concepts for how small investigators and firms can seek and meet the approval standard for products through efficient expedited pathways.” You can keep up with the latest developments on the FDA’s website.
What Are the Side Effects of Stem Cell Injections?
As with any injection procedure, there is a small risk of bacterial infection (not associated with the product) and nerve damage. If you experience severe pain, bleeding, or swelling at your injection site, or experience symptoms like fever, nausea, dizziness, or vomiting, seek emergency medical care right away.