Last week specialists of the Paul Stradins University clinical hospital in Riga, Latvia for the first time in Baltics and for the fifth time in the world conducted two operations on transplantation of stem cells to the heart.

There is a great probability, that stem cells are able not only to survive in any organ but also to recover its functions. According to the head of the Latvian center of cardiology Andrey Erglis, 6 experiments were conducted in the world until now: four — with a positive result, and two — with a negative or neutral result. Speaking about negative results, there is a certain risk of a tumor, which can arise in the transplantation field, if the stem cells will behave in a different manner, not as physicians thought. However, Dr. Erglis assured us that none of this will happen with these patients, as the stem cells for the transplantation were taken from there own bodies.

Latvian cardiologists undertook attempt to use the stem cells for the treatment of consequences of heart attack. Two senior men with a history of heart attack, agreed to the experiment. At first the stem cells were taken from patients’ bone marrow than passed all the necessary treatment and preparations, after which stem cells were successfully transplanted in the heart. Today it is only part of a medical experiment, but if the effectiveness of such a method will be approved, than it will be a true revolution in the field medicine.In the future we will definitely benefit from such biomedicine, as it is very practical. In fact, the mentioned stem cells were administered through a special catheter by a syringe.

“The action of stem cells on a human body still needs to be studied, we do not know yet, for example, in what amount cells need to be transplanted. For this time we transplanted 30 million cells and we know that only 10% will stay in the heart as the rest will spread all over the body. Our next step is to make all the procedure more effective, so all the chain of the process would work perfectly, extraction of stem cells, their treatment and operation itself. Certainly, we are not the first in the world, who conducted such operation, but we definitely entered in world five” - Dr. Erglis commented.

This operation caused great resonance in the media as it is a world level success in the medicine.