Sacramento Boy Undergoes Stem Cell Procedure

Reporting
Kris Pickel

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) ―  All we seem to hear about is the controversy surrounding stem cells, but do you know what they can actually do? A Sacramento boy suffering from an incurable condition may be living proof that stem cells can have remarkable results.

The little boy you are about to meet is one of the first in the nation to undergo stem cell treatment for his condition.

Dallas Hextell cries like many toddlers do, but he is different. It’s his only form of communication.

“You just want him to be better. You just wish you could fix it and take it away but you can’t,” Dallas’ mother Cynthia told CBS13’s Kris Pickel.

Excited over their first born, it didn’t take long for Cynthia and Derek Hextell to suspect something was wrong with baby Dallas.

“He didn’t open his eyes. He just cried a lot and they kept saying it was colic,” explained Cynthia.

Feeling her concerns were being ignored, Cynthia switched pediatricians. At 8 months old, they were referred to a neurologist who within 15 minutes diagnosed Dallas with Cerebral Palsy. Cerebral Palsy is damage to the brain, affecting muscle control.  There is no cure, only treatments to help manage the debilitating effects.

“You can tell he’s frustrated because his mind is healthy and he want to do things physically. He just can’t.” said mom Cynthia.

At 18 months old, Dallas’ physical development was closer to an 8 month old. He has trouble with hand control and can’t wave or clap or crawl. He doesn’t talk or even babble. He just screams. Sad screams. Frustrated screams. Even happy screams.

Dallas ‘ parents hope their decision to bank his umbilical cord blood will give him a shot at a normal life. Because Dallas has access to his own stem cells, he’s been accepted into a clinical trial at Duke University.

The family recently flew to Duke for a procedure where Dallas’ stem cells are put back into his blood stream in hopes they will find their way to the damaged tissue in his brain and repair those cells.

After the procedure, Dallas and his family came back to Sacramento to wait and see if the expensive treatment would pay off. They didn’t have to wait long.

Just 5 days after the procedure, Dallas said his first word “momma”. That was quickly followed by learning to wave and even laughing.

“That’s the best feeling in the world to hear your little kid laugh,” said Dallas’ dad Derek. “He had never laughed before.”

Three months after the treatment, the little boy who didn’t have the muscle control to crawl is now scooting all over without using a walker. He also looking at his parents when they talk to him.

While there is no way to know if or how much the improvements are directly related to the treatment, Dallas is for the first time making amazing strides forward instead of falling further back.  

Cord blood stem cells are now being used to treat dozens of medical conditions from heart disease to leukemia. But banking cord blood is not cheap. The cost is about $2,000 initially and then $100 every year after that in storage costs.

(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

Dallas Hextell has show amazing improvement since undergoing an experimental stem cell procedure for his Cerebral Palsy. CBS

Umbilical cord blood can help metabolic disorders

Mon Dec 10, 2007 12:42 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Umbilical cord blood transplants, even from unrelated donors, can help save the lives of babies born with certain inherited metabolic disorders, U.S. researchers reported on Monday. Usually, bone marrow transplants are the only option for such infants, who can die from organ failure and early death. Bone marrow transplants can be difficult to get and donors are rare. Umbilical cord blood, however, can be donated with every birth and also contains immature cells known as stem cells that can restore missing or damaged cells in a patient. Stem cells are the body’s master cells and there are several kinds. Stem cells from the bone marrow or cord blood are partly differentiated, or transformed, and can be used to restore the immune systems of patients undergoing cancer treatment, for example. Dr. Vinod Prasad and colleagues at Duke University in North Carolina studied 159 children with inherited metabolic disorders who received transplants of cord blood from unrelated newborns at Duke between 1995 and 2007. “We saw that there were advantages to the unrelated cord blood transplant,” Prasad said in a statement. “For instance, cord blood is more readily available than bone marrow and there was a decreased risk of complications, including a lower incidence of serious and potentially fatal graft-versus-host disease, which occurs when donor cells perceive a recipient’s tissues and organs as foreign.” Speaking to an American Society of Hematology meeting in Atlanta, Prasad said more than 88 percent of patients who got cord blood transplants before they began to show too many symptoms of illness lived for at least a year. “One reason for this could be the cord blood cells are immunologically more naive than the blood-forming stem cells derived from bone marrow and therefore they may be more adaptable and less reactive once they get into the patient’s body,” he said. One metabolic disease Prasad’s team treated is Krabbe disease, also known as Krabbe leukodystrophy, which affects the nervous system. Another is Hurler disease, which affects the heart, liver and brain. “These disorders are rare when taken individually — some of them occur in only one in a million births — but if you put them together they have a sizable incidence, maybe 1 in 10,000 births,” Prasad said. (Reporting by Maggie Fox, editing by Will Dunham and Sandra Maler)

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