Patients lose sight after stem cell injection in eyes

An unproven stem cell treatment for failing eyesight had led to severe, permanent eye damage in three patients, all women, in Sunrise, Florida.

According to an article published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, the treatment at an unregulated clinic in the state, had rendered one patient, 72, completely blind due to the stem cell injections.

The other women 78 and 88 lost much of their eyesight.  Before the procedure, though, all and some impairment, they could still see well enough to drive.

The women suffered from macular degeneration, an eye disease that caused vision loss. The treatment cost them $5,000 each. The clinic was part of a company called Bioheart, but is now known as US Stem Cell. At the clinic, fat was sucked out of the women's bellies, by liposuction and then stem cells extracted from the fat were injected into the women's eyes.

The disastrous results are described in detail by doctors not connected to US Stem Cell in the journal article. The doctors had treated the patients within days of the injections.

In an accompanying article, scientists from the Food and Drug Administration warned that stem cells from fat ''are being used in practice on the basis of minimal clinical evidence of safety or efficacy, sometimes with the claims that they constitute revolutionary treatments for various conditions.''

This was not the first time people had come to grievous harm after undergoing unproven treatments purportedly involving stem cells. In 2010, a woman with the autoimmune disease lupus died after her own bone marrow cells were injected into her kidneys at a clinic in Thailand.

More recently, in 2013, a 69-year-old woman died after material extracted from her bone marrow was infused into the arteries feeding her brain. The woman suffered a stroke, and died shortly afterwards.