New progress in the treatment of Ataxia

What causes ataxia
Ataxia is a form of movement disorder, which leads to difficulty maintaining balance, walking, speaking, seeing, swallowing, and performing tasks requiring a high degree of motor control, such as writing and eating.
Ataxia occurs when there is damage, necrosis or degeneration to the cerebellum and spinal cord, which lead to the decrease of neurons in cerebellum and spinal cord. The cerebellar atrophy shown in imaging can also explain the decrease of cerebellar nerve cells.
Types of Ataxia
There are three overall broad categories that classify ataxia:
1.Hereditary ataxia - one that runs in the family and is inherited genetically such as spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA), Friedreich ataxia, cerebellar ataxia.
2.Acquired ataxia - may occur due to injury to the brain or due to a stroke or other brain-related disease.
3.Idiopathic late onset cerebellar ataxia (ILOA) - the cerebellum is progressively damaged due to unexplained causes, leading to ataxia such as multiple system atrophy(MSA).
Treatment of Ataxia
There have been no specific treatments for hereditary Ataxia and ILOA, which tend to worsen over time. Patients’ balance function is seriously impaired, they will be eventually paralyzed.
Through nearly 15 years of research, Wu Medical Center (WMC) found that neural stem cell transplantation therapy, especially when combined with the unique comprehensive drug-cock tail therapy invented by WMC, can produce a good recovery outcome for hereditary ataxia and unexplained ataxia. Since the pathological internal environment caused by spinocerebellar degenerative diseases is causing damage to and leading to decrease of patients’ own nerve cells there, the newly injected neural stem cells would still get affected by that environment, and cannot work well, or even would die there, leading to treatment failure.
Pathological study showed that cerebellar and spinal nerves of ataxia patients would progressively degenerate, resulting in decrease of nerve cells, and increase of neuroglia. WMC found that with the protection and support from its unique drug-cock tail therapy, the injected neural stem cells can effectively increase patients cerebellar and spinal nerve cells, and the nerve growth factors produced by those neural stem cells can help protect damaged nerve cells. The combination of neural stem cells and mesenchymal stem cells in the treatment is method for WMC to promote treatment effects. Mesenchymal stem cells’ secretory function can improve the function of dendrites and synapses of nerve cells (differentiated from neural stem cells), and stabilize the astrocytes, thereby promoting the recovery of damaged nerves.
Treatment focus:
1. Only neural stem cell therapy can be effective to treat ataxia, because only neural stem cells can directly differentiate into neural cells. It is difficult for other kinds of stem cells to differentiate into neural cells, and their vitality is not enough.
2. Only with the support from the comprehensive drug therapy can neural stem cell therapy be effective. Because the pathological environment caused by the disease can also cause neural stem cells to lose function.
3. Transplantation method: it is not practical to transplant the neural stem cells through blood (blood vessels), because the stem cells transplanted through blood (blood vessels) cannot get through the blood brain barrier (BBB), which exist between the blood and the brain/spinal cord, into the nervous system, since neural stem cells need to enter the central nervous system to have therapeutic effect.