Stem cells give heart patient new lease on life   

For the past four years, Mildred Salas thought each Valentine's Day might be the last with her husband, Anthony.

"You could definitely say I had a heavy heart," she said.

Her heart was heavy because her husband was sick. He had, doctors said, an inoperable condition.

No more.

"My heart is singing now," she said. "I have my best friend back. He has so much energy, so much passion. What's happened is a miracle."

The Salases went to Laughlin on Friday and Saturday for the first part of a Valentine's Day weekend celebration. Little Anthony & The Imperials, a group that brings back memories of their early years together, was performing. Then they went to Santa Fe Station Sunday for a special dinner.

"We had some catching up to do," Anthony Salas said.

Salas, whose heart-related chest pain had him taking nitroglycerine tablets or sipping morphine, became part of an experiment in August known as "Injection of Autologous CD34-Positive Cells for Neovascularization and Symptom Relief in Patients with Myocardial Ischemia."

That is better known as stem cell therapy.

Researchers in La Jolla, Calif., collected special stem cells from Salas' own blood and then injected them into his heart.

Doctors, who had seen such therapy help animals, theorized that the stem cells would then help him help himself.

That theory apparently is being proved by the 58-year-old Salas.

"I feel like I have a new life now," he said last week. "I feel great. I don't have any pain, and I don't have to use oxygen any more."

Stem cells, the basic building blocks of the human body, are those that have the potential to develop into different types of cells. Researchers believe stem cells can be spurred into developing into most of the 220 types of cells found in the human body, offering the greatest potential for medicine since antibiotics.

The study that Salas is part of -- led by Drs. Douglas Losordo in Boston and Richard Schatz at Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla -- is investigating whether a dose of a person's own stem cells can help the heart grow new blood vessels, which would mean more blood and oxygen would get carried to the heart muscle.

Because the recurrent pain known as angina is caused by too little blood getting to the heart muscle, researchers theorize chest pain will be relieved through the growth of new blood vessels.

What has happened to Salas, according to Schatz, is amazing.

Still, Schatz said the scientist in him makes him cautious.

"Technically, of course, Tony could have gotten a placebo," he said. "But we have a lot of experience with a placebo, and this isn't the way someone responds with a placebo. He's asymptomatic now. His time on treadmill has doubled. ... All the evidence concurs that the therapy has helped him."

Three out of four patients in the study actually received stem cells. Even Schatz is unaware of whether he injected the saltwater placebo into Salas' heart. This summer, researchers will "unblind" the study, and Salas and Schatz will know whether his own stem cells are responsible for his good health.

The blind study involved 24 patients on the East and West coasts. They are the sickest of the sick, all considered inoperable.

Salas, who had to drag an oxygen tank behind him wherever he went for years, had been hospitalized 33 times for heart problems in the past four years.

He's had triple bypass surgery and 33 stents implanted. Stents are small, metallic, meshlike tubes designed to support plaque-damaged arterial walls after a blockage has been removed.

For some reason, almost all of his arterial walls closed down within a month of receiving the stents. He couldn't walk 50 yards without pain radiating in his chest, jaw, arms and wrists.

"Basically, doctors told me to go home and die," Salas said.

And then he heard about the study.

It took about four months before Salas started feeling better. Now he goes on Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman's lunchtime walks around downtown.

"For three months, I still felt like crap," he said. "I was still taking nitroglycerin tablets all the time and using oxygen to walk through my house. And then in December, my life began to change. Now I feel like I haven't felt in years."

Mildred Salas, whose health insurance covers her husband, has long prayed that if her husband grew new blood vessels, his body wouldn't turn on him again. She is afraid that whatever made his vessels close down in the past will come back again.

"I need to learn to be as optimistic as Tony," she said. "Every day when I woke up, I felt him to see if he was cold. That's how afraid I was of him dying."

Salas, who had to leave his work as a mechanical designer because of his heart condition, thinks the worst is behind him. He feels so good he's become a candidate for City Council in Ward 6.

Mildred Salas couldn't believe her eyes when they got to their hotel in Laughlin.

"I used to have to worry about having his oxygen and his wheelchair and all his medicine when we went anywhere," she said. "Now he unloads our luggage. ... I figure if he can beat death, he can beat anything."