How Stem Cell Therapy Treat Chronic Kidney Disease

Chronic kidney disease is the slow loss of kidney function over time. The main function of the kidneys is to remove wastes and excess water from the body. This artical is the introduction of stem cell therapy treat chronic kidney disease.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) slowly gets worse over time. In the early stages, there may be no symptoms. The loss of function usually takes months or years to occur. It may be so slow that symptoms do not appear until kidney function is less than one-tenth of normal.

The final stage of chronic kidney disease is called end-stage renal disease (ESRD). At this stage, the kidneys are no longer able to remove enough wastes and excess fluids from the body. The patient needs dialysis or a kidney transplant.

Much attention recently has been focused on stem cell technology as a possible alternative modality of treatment of a variety of diseases. Chronic kidney disease is a serious health problem and most chronic kidney diseases share in common the presence of interstitial and glomerular fibrosis, regardless of the underlying cause. To date there are no specific therapies aimed at treating fibrosis in the kidney. In a novel effort to address the underlying pathology in kidney disease, researchers are demonstrating that stem cell therapy can attenuate fibrosis in chronic kidney disease in animal models. This review will focus on the recent developments in stem cell research and their possible implications to treat chronic kidney disease

Chronic kidney disease causes dysfunction of the cells from vascular, interstitial, glomerular and tubular compartments, which triggers the release of fibrogenic cytokines and recruitment of inflammatory cells to injured kidneys. The rapid interposition of scar tissue probably confers a survival advantage by preventing infectious microorganisms from invading the wound, but prevents subsequent tissue or renal cell regeneration.

After Stem cell transplantation into CKD patient provides improvement like reduced creatinine level because stem cells like mesenchymal stem cell has the property to differentiate into renal specific cells also like nephron, tubular epithelial cells and others. After infusion of stem cells into the CKD patients via intravenously then these stem cells automatically migrate to the injured/inflammated site and then start to regenerate the damaged/injured renal tissue and also induce/activate resident stem cells in the renal via para/autocrine signaling. So mesenchymal stem cells therapy provides better environment to regenerate the damaged cells via differentiating into the renal specific cells and also induce the resident stem cells.

Those are the introduction of how stem cell therapy treat chronic kidney disease. Compared with other kidney disease treat methods, stem cell therapy is an effective one to treat chronic kidney disease.