Little-known Alzheimer's disease 'cure' may lie in period blood says doctor
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The idea of using period blood as 'medicine' may be enough to make you squirm. Yet experts claim that menstrual fluids hold the potential to fight various neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's. Dr Karan Rajan, an NHS surgeon and lecturer at the University of Sunderland, is among them, having spoken of its 'amazing' abilities in a video posted to Instagram. He stressed that stem cells found within the blood are a big part of its appeal, as they can develop into various other cell types in the body.
"Can menstrual blood cure Alzheimer's?", he asked his 1.6 million followers (@drkaranrajan). "Let me give you the bad news and the good news. So, the endometrium, the lining of the womb, is the only part of the adult human body that can heal itself without scarring every month.
"And that's down to the amazing regenerative abilities of menstrual blood-derived stem cells. Basically, the biological version of Play-Doh, these stem cells can turn into a number of different cell types - bone, brain, liver, blood, heart and more. "The issue is, this research is in a very, very early stage - even in mice. Most of the data we have is from cells in a petri dish or from animal models and there is a long way to go before we translate it into human studies.".
Among the research on this topic is a study led by China's Zhejiang University from 2018. It saw that use of menstrual blood-derived 'mesenchymal' stem cells held anti-inflammatory effects and 'dramatically improved the spatial learning and memory' in mice.
