People are taking Lipitor and other statins to lower cholesterol more then any other class of prescription drugs. Unfortunately, these medications come with side effects.

One of the more common side effects is muscle pain and weakness. This can occur even at standard doses. The use of statins and muscle pain may result from a deficiency in Coenzyme Q10. The statins inhibit the production of Coenzyme Q10. CoQ-10 is a very important nutrient for heart health and is found in every cell in your body.

People taking statins are apt to have pain including aching in the shoulders, pain in the jaw and sore muscles of the legs. The pains result from the actual breakdown of the muscles and the body’s natural process of ridding itself to the waste cells that result.

The symptoms can range from general fatigue all the way to significant and even debilitating pain. These symptoms can develop slowly over time making it difficult to self diagnose.

Natural Alternatives!

To avoid the whole issue of statins and muscle pain, you may want to consider natural alternatives to control your cholesterol

Some options include perilla oil and other sources of omega-3s. Arjuna which is a plant based supplement with amazing cholesterol reducing properties, or niacin supplements which raise your levels of high density lipoproteins that in turn help to lower bad cholesterol. Also look for plant sterol and stanol products. These have been studied for over fifty years and show consistent results in lowering cholesterol. These sterols can be found in a few high quality statin alternative supplements.

Equally important is to be sure that you eat a healthy diet and get enough exercise. These are the foundations of good health and you cannot expect to be well if you are not doing both.

Therapies using stem cells have at least forty years since the first bone marrow transplant was performed in 1969 by Edward Donnall Thomas, Nobel Prize for medicine in 1990, based on a research he carried out since the fifties. But we now know that bone marrow transplants are in fact hematopoietic stem cell grafts. 4239 transplants were performed in France, just in 2007.

The idea of using umbilical cord blood stem cells is old, an article published in one of the world’s leading general medical journals, “The Lancet”, was considering this possibility since 1939 and the first attempt to treat a patient suffering from cancer by transfusion dates from 1963. But only in 1988 the team of Professor Eliane Gluckman at Saint-Louis hospital could establish the protocol followed now, in operating the first successful transplant to treat a child suffering from Franconi disease. Therapies derived from cord blood, either to treat bone marrow diseases or reconstitute the dermis, require the involvement of the state which must act as a driving force, otherwise its liability could be one day potentially involved due to the lack of information provided.

Existing Therapies

The first successful therapeutic efforts based on umbilical cord blood were focused on blood diseases. In a second time, advances in knowledge of the different types of stem cells and their function will undoubtedly allow soon, the development of new therapies with the ability to repair the dermis of irradiated people and those with big burns.

Current Therapies Related to Blood Diseases

Hematopoietic stem cells from cord blood can favorably replace bone marrow cells for several reasons. Firstly, the greater immaturity of cord blood stem cells provides a more effective transplant. On the other hand, the chances to find a sample of cord blood compatible with a patient which has no parental relationship with the donor, are significantly higher than those of finding a bone marrow donor for an allogenic transplant.

The statistics given by Professor Gregory Katz-Benichou for the United States show that a third of patients waiting for bone marrow transplantation, have to find a donor outside their families and less than a third of them (9% of total patients) found a compatible donor. Conversely, all the investigations made in order to establish the number of cord blood transplants available worldwide were successful. Thus all patients undergoing a cord blood transplant are finding compatible grafts.

Over 20 000 people have been transplanted since 1988 and it is not surprising that cord blood transplants are growing each year at the expense of bone marrow. In 2007, cord blood transplants accounted for 27% of allogenic transplants performed in France.

All the ABC’s of bioethics have returned currently to the issue of embryo research. But first of all, let’s remind what’s the definition of a stem cell.

There are two kinds of stem cells: the totipotent stem cell which has the ability to differentiate into all types of cells, and the pluripotent stem cell which has a capability to give several types of cells. Apparently, the interest of researchers is focused on embryonic stem cells, the only problem is that they may involve the destruction of the embryo.

The researchers are interested by embryonic stem cells, which are extracted from embryos aged 5 to 7 days, i.e., those called pluripotent because they can differentiate into several types of human cell (blood, liver, heart, muscle, etc. ). For Annelise Bennaceur, a french hematologist and director of an INSERM unit on stem cell models:

Knowing how does an embryo form is essential for the understanding of human genetic diseases that form in early stages of development.

In addition, the aim of stem cell research is to treat serious disorders. With embryonic stem cells, the idea is to control their differentiation by forcing them to evolve into the type of cell we want. But there are other sources of stem cells such as the adult stem cell, the cord blood stem cell and the induced pluripotent cells, which are adult cells reprogrammed to treat a specific pathology. Some types of cells have already proven their effectiveness: nearly 10 000 cord blood transplants were carried out in the world to treat blood diseases.

For instance, Nicolas Forraz, a researcher at the Institute for Research on Cord Blood Cell therapy (Lyon Saint-Priest / France) along with Professor Colin McGuckin, at the University of Newcastle, were able to differentiate cord blood stem cells in precursors of nerve cells, liver and pancreas. Furthermore, they identified pluripotent stem cells in the cord blood. Quoting Nicolas Forraz:

I feel sorry that most of the french public funds are invested in embryonic stem cell research. It would take at least a rebalancing of the grants.

Finally, there is another significant problem that those attempting to use embryonic stem cells for therapeutic purposes have to confront, it’s called immune rejection. Because embryonic stem cells will not ordinarily have been derived from the specific patient to be treated, there is a risk that they will be rejected by that patient’s immune system.

Scientists have proposed several different ways of avoiding this difficulty. These include using research cloning (somatic cell nuclear transfer) procedures to generate human embryonic stem cells that are genetically identical to those of the person receiving the transplant, genetically engineering the embryonic stem cells to express certain antigens of the recipient that would counter any possible immune reaction, or developing ”universal” donor stem cell lines that could be used in many different patients. However, each of these methods has its drawbacks.