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By Dai Lian and Yu Dawei
BEIJING (Caixin Online) — Diabetes has taken a heavy toll on 68-year-old Yu Shuangfeng. She suffers from blurred vision and high blood pressure, as well as impaired kidneys.
Yu so desperately wanted relief about a year ago that she traveled from her home in Dalian to the People’s Liberation Army Hospital No. 455 in Shanghai for what was promoted as an expensive yet genuine cure: a stem-cell transplant.
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But the hoped-for miracle never happened. Instead, complications related to Yu’s diabetes worsened after the 70,000 yuan ($10,680) procedure. She’s been hospitalized twice in recent months for blurred vision. And she still needs insulin shots.
On a positive note, Yu is alive. That’s not the case for Hong Chun, a diabetes sufferer from the city of Jinhua in Zhejiang province who also underwent stem cell treatment at PLA Hospital No. 455 last year. The day after surgery, Hong complained of nausea and dizziness, and within four days he was dead. The cause of death remains a mystery.
Yu, Hong and countless other Chinese diabetes patients have undergone stem-cell transplants in recent years. And “stem-cell treatment centers” at hospitals nationwide offer to treat not only diabetes, but also liver disease, Parkinson’s disease, autism, deafness, cerebral palsy and other incurable ailments.
China is unique in using stem-cell transplantation to treat diabetes and other diseases. Elsewhere around the world, the procedure is still undergoing clinical tests. So far, most researchers say, major technical hurdles prevent the general use of stem-cell technology for diabetes patients.
Caixin learned from the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and four other research institutions that, to date, none of the stem-cell treatments offered by hospitals in China have been approved or even reviewed by government health regulators. The Ministry of Health has approved stem-cell treatment for certain blood diseases, but nothing else.
Technically, stem-cell therapy for diabetes is still at the research stage in China, said Wu Zuze, a specialist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who’s been studying stems cells since the 1970s. No procedure has reached the “application stage” in the regulatory approval process, he said.
So why are hospitals allowed to give patients such as Yu and Hong stem cell transplants? The answer is that medical institutions nationwide, including well-known hospitals, label the treatment “clinical research,” not patient treatment, thus dodging regulatory oversight.
However, hospital advertising and other documents promoting stem-cell treatment for Chinese diabetes patients say nothing about “research.” Instead, their sales pitches can be slick.
Zhang Zhixun, a 58-year-old engineer from the city of Yichang, Hubei province, remembers speaking by telephone with a service representative at PLA Hospital No. 455 last year about his interest in stem-cell treatment.
“I was enchanted,” Zhang said. “The person who answered the phone was very skilled and understood the way patients think.”
Zhang got the treatment, but today he still has diabetes. “No one ever told me that they were only doing clinical research,” he said.
Research loophole
Medical experts in China have been more enthusiastic than their international counterparts about putting stem-cell treatment to work.
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