Three-year-old girl is the first to receive stem cell treatment for Cerebral Palsy
Sasha took part in a new trial to help treat her cerebral palsy – a condition where the brain doesn’t work properly, causing problems with movement, posture and co-ordination. Cerebral palsy can occur before, during or after birth, but the severity may not become obvious until early childhood. Known causes of cerebral palsy can include:
- Infection in early pregnancy
- Oxygen starvation at birth
- Difficult or premature birth
- A cerebral (brain) bleed
- Abnormal brain development
- A genetic link (this is quite rare)
Doctors injected little Sasha with stem cells taken from the umbilical cord shortly after she was born. She was injected into her ankle in the hope that the stem cells will travel up to her brain and help repair some of the damaged tissue.
Sasha’s parents, Tania and Richard, both 43, were impressed with their daughter’s progress after the procedure and her mother said: ‘Sasha’s therapists would turn around and say. ‘Look at the difference in her – her walking is streets ahead of what it was before; look at her hand – last time I saw her hand it was closed and now it is moving more.’
‘We feel there has been some general improvement in her motor skills and perhaps some improvement in her vision and cognitive ability.
‘We can’t categorically say this is attributable to the stem cell infusion. However, we and Sasha’s therapist feel the improvement has potentially been at a faster rate than it may have occurred, or in comparison with other children with similar abilities.’
In fact, Sasha’s improvement has been so great that it may not be necessary for her to have an operation planned to correct a squint and even her Ophthalmologist couldn’t rule out that the stem cell transfusion was responsible for her improvement.
Sasha and her parents live in Dubai, where Mr Browne, from Solihull, West Midlands, works as an operation manager for a British construction firm. Sasha was born in Dubai.
Her parents paid £1,900 to store Sasha’s umbilical cord blood with Smart Cells, a British firm with a branch in Dubai, as an ‘insurance policy’ to help with any illness Sasha may have had when she was older. This was before they found out that Sasha had cerebral palsy.
Sasha took part in the trial a year ago at Duke University in North Carolina, US, by Dr Joanne Kurtzberg who observed improvements of many of the children taking part in the trial. She is now carrying out phase two of the trial to see whether these improvements were carried out by the stem cells or a placebo affects.
Doctors have been looking into the benefits of stem cell treatment because it is known to help regenerate cells to repair tissue damage. Stem cells are collected from the umbilical cord and can be used to treat disorders such as Leukaemia and Anaemia.
Scope the disability charity which focuses on helping those with cerebral palsy, reacted cautiously to the news of the trial:
A spokesperson said ‘Each person with cerebral palsy is an individual who will respond differently to one treatment compared to another person. There are lots of therapies out there but we never endorse one over the other for that reason. We would advise patients to seek medical advice before embarking on any course of treatment.’
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