Menstrual blood can repair damaged hearts

A recent landmark study by the Japanese researchers from Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo unveiled that cells from women's menstrual blood may be helpful in repairing damaged heart tissue.

According to Japanese scientists, who conducted the study in association with scientists from the National Institute for Child Health and Development in Tokyo, Tokyo Women’s Medical University, and Kanazawa University, found that cells taken from menstrual blood can be cultivated in the lab and used like stem cells to repair heart damage.

The initial findings of the study released last week in the journal Stem Cells online. The study suggests that stem cells can be used to repair damaged tissue because they have the potential to become any cell in the body.

For the study, the lead author Dr Shunichiro Miyoshi, a cardiologist at Keio University School of Medicine, in Tokyo, and colleagues gathered the precursor cells, called mesenchymal cells (MMCs), from menstrual blood donated by nine women volunteers and cultivated them for about a month.

About three days after being put together in vitro with cells from the hearts of rats, about 20 percent of the cells began beating spontaneously and eventually formed sheet-like heart muscle tissue.

According to the lead researcher Miyoshi, the success rate is 100 times higher than the 0.2 to 0.3 percent for stem cells taken from human bone marrow.

“There may be a system in the near future that allows women to use it for their own treatment,” he said. Researchers hope women’s menstrual blood would likely overcome the major problem of immune system rejection.

In another set of experiments, live rats that had suffered heart attacks showed significant improvement after being implanted with the menstrual blood cells. The researchers noticed that the implanted MMCs gave rise to cardiomyocytes in the rats' hearts and decreased the myocardial infarction (MI) area.

Miyoshi said that the cells can be stored for a long time in a tube the size of a finger and cultivated when necessary. "In proper storage, we would be able to stock up a tremendous count of cells in a small space. If they are not used for 100 years, they could stay there for 200 years or 300 years" waiting for a perfect match, he added.

However, Miyoshi is not really satisfied with the findings of the experiment. “I guess this can't be ready for clinical use yet. There should be a definite factor that turns the cells into a heart and we want to find it,” he said.