Stem cell therapy for Alzheimer’s disease. Does it work?

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Many people have approached me over the years concerning friends, family members or others with Alzheimer’s disease. They all ask a simple question: can an infusion of adult (nonembryonic) stem cells slow, halt or even reverse AD? The qualified answer is: in animal models of AD, yes. In very preliminary human use experiments, yes, but even so what I’ve observed in AD patients treated with various kinds of adult stem cells experience is that their improvements are transient (The AD disease process undoes any gains over time — sometimes in a relatively short span of time).

There are some interesting stem cell based interventional strategies for remediating AD, some of which are outlined in this August 2020 paper: Stem cell therapy for Alzheimer’s disease (nih.gov). This statement in the abstract is very telling: “….many steps still need to be taken before stem cell therapy becomes a clinically feasible treatment for human AD and related diseases. This paper reviews the pathophysiology of AD and the application prospects of related stem cells based on cell type”.

Not surprisingly there are clinical trials being planned and carried out which involve the use of various kinds of stem cells. Here is a link to one of these studies which proposes treating six AD patients with a series of mesenchymal stem cell injections (Specifically, umbilical cord-derived, allogeneic hMSC administered intravenously at a dose of 100 million cells per infusion): Alzheimer’s Disease Stem Cells Multiple Infusions – Full Text View – ClinicalTrials.gov (This is an Phase I, prospective, open-label clinical study. What Are the Different Types of Clinical Research? | FDA). 

I am not BTW part of any AD research project or undertaking at this point-in-time.

Does this mean I am not “working on AD”? No. I actually came up with a novel approach some fifteen (15) years ago to slowing progression and possibly reversing some of the neurological damage. Various planks in my unpublished (2005) hypothesis have since been independently suggested by other researchers and some of these have garnered evidence of merit in benchtop, animal and some human studies. Encouraged by this I dug out my original body of work, am updating it now and will probably submit it to a peer reviewed journal in early 2021.

Readers of my blog are encouraged to check back here for updates on this line of explor-i-mentation or can email me concerning my progress at nativescienceguy at gmail.com.