Efficacy of Mesenchymal and Embryonic Stem Cell Therapy for the Treatment of Spinal Cord Injury: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Human Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Study DesignSystematic review and meta-analysis.ObjectivesThe objective of this study was to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature regarding the therapeutic effect of embryonic and mesenchymal stem cells on the treatment of traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) in humans. Primary outcome measures were overall American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) scores, ASIA motor and sensory scores, urinary and bowel function, pain, and adverse events.MethodsStudies with human patients ages 18-80 years receiving embryonic, induced pluripotent, or mesenchymal stem cells for SCI were included. Study quality was assessed using the Cochrane risk of bias 2 tool and the Newcastle Ottawa scale for randomized and non-randomized studies, respectively. Primary outcomes were overall ASIA grade, ASIA motor scores, ASIA sensory scores, bladder and bowel function, pain, and adverse events.ResultsThirty total studies with 656 patients were included, with 43.3% of patients experiencing improvement in ASIA grade, 49.4% in motor function, and 73.6% in sensory function. Qualitative analysis of bladder and bowel outcomes suggests overall improved sensation and control. No serious adverse events were reported. The most common side effects were mild and resolved within hours to weeks without requiring additional medical treatment.ConclusionsStem cell transplantation for SCI appears to offer moderate improvements in overall ASIA grade, motor, sensory, bladder, and bowel function, accompanied by a relatively mild and transient side effect profile. Further research, particularly high-quality, blinded, randomized controlled trials, is essential to optimize treatment protocols and achieve more consistent and improved clinical outcomes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".