Stem Cells and Rheumatoid Arthritis

What is Rheumatoid Arthritis?

Rheumatoid Arthritis is an inflammatory disorder that affects the joints and progressively causes deformity majorly to the hands and the feet. It occurs when the body’s autoimmune system attacks the tissue, which includes the joints, leading to painful swelling and damage to the joint linings.  The effect can reach to the internal organs, leading to the damage to the heart.

Will stem cells help in the treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis?

There are many treatments currently available for rheumatoid arthritis. In recent years, there have been many innovations in rheumatoid arthritis treatment. The long lists of treatment have similar limitations. While they can have some short term benefits and improvement in the patient’s condition, they don’t help in the long term.  They don’t undo the damage that has been done to the joints or other tissues or the internal organs. While they help to repress immune responses, such repression is non directional leading to no permanent care.

Examples of such treatments include the disease modifying anti rheumatic drugs like the methotrexate, infliximab, steroids and cyclosporine and biologics like etanercept, adalimumab and abatacept. The targeted biological therapies that have been developed have led to improvements in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, but the problem of long term healing still persists.

Stem cell treatments are now being researched for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis in humans. After a lot of years experimenting on animals with rheumatoid arthritis, the potency of stem cell treatment has been significantly recorded. Stem cell treatments unlike regular rheumatoid arthritis treatment have the ability to heal damaged joints and other tissues. They do this by manufacturing anti-inflammatory agents.

Apart from the reparative potentials, they can also help to prevent antibody responses from the immune system without compromising the immune’s system disease warding potential. Mesenchymal stem cells have been researched to produce immune cells that even help to shield the body from attack by its own immune system. And unlike the regular rheumatoid arthritis treatments, there are no long term adverse effects since the immune response repression is well directed.

Studies have continued to show that mesenchymal stem cells will help in the cure of rheumatoid arthritis. There have been improvements in the condition of the patient that have lasted long. A recent study even showed a major decrease in cytokines IL-6 and TNF (which are cytokines that cause inflammation).