Florida Loses Appeal in Terri Schiavo Case
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to take up “Terri’s Law,” the measure initiated by Gov. Jeb Bush in October 2003 to keep Schiavo alive. The Florida Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional.
USF Professor Jay Wolfson, who served as Terri Schiavo’s court-appointed guardian, said that a new panel of experts should be convened to put to rest any lingering questions on whether Terri has any hope of recovery.
Wolfson, who is both a doctor and lawyer, said that Terri’s husband and parents would have to drop their legal fight in favor of whichever side the independent medical experts support.
According to Barbara Weller, attorney for parents Bob and Mary Schindler, “The problem is finding truly neutral doctors.”
Cord Blood Offers Second Chance
Cord blood donated from Hawaii newborns has already resulted in four matches to Asian patients on the mainland with aggressive forms of leukemia, according to Dr. Randal Wada, founder and medical director of the Hawaii Cord Blood Bank.
The volume drawn from the umbilical cord comprises a unit. Some are bigger than others and suitable for larger patients, Wada said. “More is better.”
The first cord blood unit matched from Hawaii went to a 49-year-old woman in Illinois last August; the second, in September, to a 2-year-old boy in Minnesota; the third, in November, to a 17-year-old girl in Texas; and the fourth to a 15-year-old boy in North Carolina.
“These four people had a second chance from something we would have tossed in the trash,” Wada said. “This is recycling someone’s life. It’s quite remarkable,” he added, noting the young Hawaii bank has collected only about 550 units. Most cord blood banks only start getting matches after an inventory of a couple thousand blood units, he said.
The nonprofit Hawaii Cord Blood Bank is one of fewer than two dozen public cord blood banks in the country and the only one in the Pacific. Thus, cord blood collected from Hawaii’s racially diverse newborns greatly increases chances of a match for patients with aggressive cancer.
Adult Stem Cell Therapy Improves Heart Failure
Patients with heart failure experienced a marked improvement after being given an injection of their own stem cells, investigators reported at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Thoracic Surgery in Tampa, Florida.
Dr. Amit N. Patel, from the University of Pittsburgh, and his associates previously found that stem cells injected during bypass surgery improve heart function. The current study is the first in which a minimally invasive technique was used, the researchers note.
Before the procedure, the patients underwent various tests to identify regions in the heart that were not beating properly. Using a tiny tube to visualize the heart muscle, the researchers injected stem cells into the poorly functioning areas of the hearts of 15 patients. Fifteen other patients served as a comparison group, receiving injections that lacked stem cells.
The patients who got the stem cells experienced a much greater improvement in heart function than comparison subjects. Moreover, ultrasound testing showed that the hearts of stem cell-treated patients shrank from an abnormally large size to a more normal size than did those of comparison subjects.
As to why stem cell therapy helps with heart failure, Patel cited several possible reasons, including stimulating blood vessel formation and muscle growth.
For their next trial, the investigators will be doing the same type of experiment but with patients who have extreme heart failure and are awaiting a heart transplant. In contrast to the current group, these patients will receive stem cell injections to the entire heart, which will give “a more definitive answer as to what is actually happening to these cells,” he added.
