Dr. Joy Kong explains what stem cells are and how they age. Stem cells have two key abilities: self-renewal and differentiation into specialized cells. Mesenchymal stem cells live along blood vessels, detect inflammation, and repair tissue, but their numbers and function decline with age.
So what is a stem cell? I get that question asked a lot. Let me break it down for you. I'm Dr. Joy Kong, a triple board certified doctor and a stem cell specialist. There are two things that stem cells do. One, they can renew themselves. Two is that they can differentiate, which means gaining function and making more specialized cells. When we were born, we were once a single stem cell, and from there on, the cells keep dividing and migrating and start to form more complex structures. Each step along the way, they gain function and lose potential, and when they finally become a working cell of that tissue, now they're are no longer stem cells. But what cells do we actually use in stem cell therapy nowadays? The most common cells we use is what's called mesenchymal stem cells, or MSCs for short. So MSCs are everywhere along your blood vessels, and their function is to sense what's going through your blood and what's going on in the neighborhood. They can squeeze themselves into blood vessels to find signals of inflammation and injury and then get out of the blood vessel to rescue the local tissue. So your immune system can send troops to come over and rescue and do the repair work. So MSCs decline as age, and stem cell therapy can replenish the population, thus giving the body more signals to regenerate. Have you received stem cell therapy? Do you know what kind of cells you got? If you don't, we should talk.
