Rising Incidences of Palsy: Is Maternal Smoking to be blamed?

Congenital cerebral palsy, constitutes a number of locomotion and posture issues leading to nonprogressive disturbances in developing a fetus. In the past couple of decades, cerebral palsy is becoming the widest spread physical, developmental disability found to be prevalent in more than 2 live births out of 1000 children in developed countries. While investigating the underlying cause, researchers have decoded the link between maternal smoking and neuronal cell death that leads to the most common childhood physical disability.

Studies have further indicated that when the brain is deprived of oxygen-rich blood for a longer period of time, it experiences an immediate oxidative stress and hypoxia ischemic injuries, causing neuronal cell death. Due to massive brain cell death, signaling pathways responsible for the passage of important information for regulating movement and memory retention are interrupted. In this regard, a new research published in the journal Frontiers in molecular neuroscience explains how maternal smoking, particularly in the last three months of pregnancy, is associated with poor brain responses, massive cellular death, and reduced motor skills as well as mental retardation. The finding can be one of the primary reasons for a mother to be to completely avoid smoking, in fact not even for several months but years before their pregnancy; since smoking can as well affect the quality of eggs before their fertilization.

While estimating the number of harmful impacts, smoking has on developing fetus; it has been observed that smoking in women increases the risk of:

·         Low birth weight

·         Premature delivery

·         Still births and/or miscarriage

·         Birth defects like Cerebral Palsy, Autism, etc.

·         Respiratory problems

What are currently available treatments for cerebral palsy?

While evaluating currently available options for cerebral palsy, scientists emphasized that the treatment should be multifaceted with the inclusion of scientific expertise, specialists, and modern therapies. It has also been noted that early interventions have higher chances of improvements. Having said that it is always beneficial to discuss with your specialist about emotional as well as physical improvement, your child might exhibit post-treatment. At present various rehabilitative therapies can be offered including physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, etc. to allow holistic development; although the root cause of concern can always be ignored.

Regenerative medicine has been identified to offer a completely viable treatment option by targeting and manipulating the root cause, i.e. the neurons. In this regard, scientists have endorsed stem cell therapy for cerebral palsy to be the safe treatment without any side effects.

Stem cells are the primitive cells of our body, blessed with an inherent ability to differentiate into the entire cellular makeup of an individual during embryonic development. During developmental period, these stem cells reserve their quota in different mature organs to provide support in case of normal wear and tear of the organ.

Scientific innovation and technology have accessed easy isolation of these stem cells from body’s autologous sources, enrichment outside the body and infusion back at the site of injury to regain lost functional attributes.

Various clinical studies conducted worldwide, have evidently confirmed that stem cells isolated from autologous sources of our body, such as bone marrow and adipose tissues can be differentiated into neuronal cells if passed through the proper channel. Besides, these infused stem cells can also trigger stimulation of resident stem cells to create a perfect microenvironment for population doubling and cellular differentiation; thus, accelerate healing and functional restoration.

Thus, the exciting therapeutic outcome was seen so far during a complete journey from scientific research to clinical applications of stem cell therapy; stem cell treatment for cerebral palsy is acknowledged to be the best available treatment.