At last I’m free of the pain that ruined my 20s
FOR Charlotte Howe, the symptoms of Crohn’s disease were so debilitating that she was forced to give up her university course and even undergo major surgery.
Charlotte was diagnosed with the condition – which causes the lining of the digestive system to inflame, causing abdominal pain and extreme exhaustion – when she was 20.
But after undergoing stem cell treatment, she has now been clear of symptoms for the past five years.
She says: ‘Crohn’s totally dominated my life, affecting my work and my social life. ‘I was experiencing acute pain but the doctors weren’t able to find out why it was so bad.
‘At one stage I had emergency surgery to remove my entire small bowel and then had a stoma and colostomy bag for a year. The doctors thought I was cured. But unfortunately the Crohn’s came back with a vengeance and life was hell for the next seven years.’
Then Charlotte, now 35, was referred by her consultant to a stem cell trial being carried out at Barts Hospital in London.
Over a period of 18 months, she under went two courses of chemotherapy, which meant losing her hair both times, before being infused with her own stem cells that had been grown in a laboratory.
Charlotte, from Surbiton, Surrey, says: ‘ Within a couple of weeks of completing the infusion I was starting to feel better. After a couple of months I had very few symptoms.
‘And by six months I was off all my medications, living a life free from Crohn’s.’
Many of the 115,000 people affected by Crohn’s in the UK are young, often diagnosed in their teenage years or 20s, and many are resistant to treatment.
Like Charlotte, for some, extreme surgery to remove the damaged sections of the intestines and bowel can mean a colostomy, in which waste is collected in a bag, via a man-made port in the stomach.
But following stem cell transplants to rebuild the immune system, many Crohn’s patients are now seeing enormous improvements in their condition.
In August it was announced that a further UK trial of stem cell transplant sf orCrohn’ s will recruit 99 patients for the same treatment Charlotte received across eight NHS hospitals.
The treatment is similar to that for MS, using chemotherapy to wipe out the patients’ immune system, before injecting them with their own stem cells harvested from bone marrow.
The hope is that the rebuilt immune system will no longer react against the patients’ own gut, and will also help patients tol- erate drug treatments better. Professor John Snowden, who will co-ordinate the Sheffield arm of the trial, said: ‘There are quite significant numbers of patients resistant to modern treatment who are relatively young.
‘They have been treated with stem cells and many did see good benefits, so now it’s going to be examined properly in a clinical trial setting.’
Professor Tom Walley, director of the National Institute for Health Research evaluation, trials and studies programmes, which funded the trial, said stem cells had ‘great potential’.