Joel Parran, a 61-year-old dentist from Maryland, suffered a heart attack March 19 while working out at his local gym.He was rushed to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he underwent heart surgery, which included the insertion of four stents into his narrowed arteries. An otherwise fit and healthy man, Parran was on his way to a swift recovery from the operation.But then the doctors asked Parran if he’d be willing to take part in a milestone medical experiment -- an infusion of adult stem cells from donor bone marrow that might possibly reverse damage to his heart tissue caused by the attack."I gave it a lot of consideration,” Parran said. “To be honest, I never thought of this as a life-or-death situation, but if there was a chance of this being successful, if I did get the stem cells, it might regenerate some of the muscle tissue, and I thought, ‘What do I have to lose?’ “After a work-up that included a pulmonary breathing test, a CT scan and an MRI, the doctors gave Parran an intravenous infusion of the cells, a procedure he said took about seven minutes. He remained in the hospital for four days while doctors monitored his condition.Now, two weeks after his ordeal began, Parran is back at work, treating his own patients and showing no side effects except itching caused by one of the drugs he was given during his heart surgery.And while his doctors are not attributing Parran’s recovery to the stem cell therapy, they are hoping that proof will emerge within six months that the treatment helped to repair any damaged heart tissue.
