Alzheimer’s Disease affects six in 10 people in the UK with dementia – and with symptoms such as memory loss, difficulty with speaking, hallucinations and even seizures, it can be an incredibly disruptive condition for sufferers and their families.
The disease is being continually researched and scientists are making constant breakthroughs in both the diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s, offering promise for people at risk of developing it.
One intriguing recent development is the use of period blood. That’s right, in the ongoing research into this disease, scientists have found that the blood shed during a menstrual cycle could play a key role in treating Alzheimer’s.
You could be producing the future of medicine every month
Stem cells have been used to treat autoimmune, inflammatory, neurological and orthopaedic conditions, as well as traumatic injuries, but they can often be hard to come by.
However, it turns out there is a source of stem cells that has researchers excited because it’s incredibly common and often easy to come by: menstrual blood.
Incredibly, researchers have found the blood that many of us with a uterus shed and dispose of every month could be key to improving Alzheimer’s disease treatment and research.
As a lot of stem cell therapies are done using embryonic cells, scientists were looking for a more accessible and less controversial way to gain the kind of stem cells that can contribute to treatments of a multitude of diseases.
What they found was that not only is menstrual blood a suitable candidate for these therapies, it could be revolutionary in treating the disease.
In this study, researchers found that injections of menstrual stem cells into the brain could not only correct learning and memory deficits in mice but even helped to remove the plaques in their brains.
How do you collect period blood then?
Obviously the collecting and storing of period blood to harvest its stem cells is a key issue here. So how would that work?
Julie Allickson, vice president of research and development for Cryo-Cell, previously told Time that women would menstruate into a cup made from medical-grade silicone, which would be inserted into the vagina.
The cup would stay there for up to three hours, collecting between 10-20ml of blood. This would then be poured into a container and sent to a company which stores stem cells – where it would be frozen and stored.
Some companies estimate that from as little as 10-15ml of period blood you can harvest around 10 million to 100 million stem cells.
“You’ve got these cells in the endometrium that are regenerating monthly for women in their reproductive years. They rapidly divide almost every 24 hours and they produce growth factors, and that’s the main mechanism we believe is assisting with repair in animal models,” said Allickson.
Menstrual blood is now proving to be an incredible resource in the world of medicine with it being used in research for future treatments of stroke, diabetes, ovarian-related diseases and neurodegenerative diseases.