Centres offering unproven stem cell therapies are crowding internet search engines, British experts have warned.
Searches on Google found that twice as many treatment centres showed in results as did news reports about stem therapy.
This was despite the searches being conducted in the UK and most of the centres being based in the USA, according to the analysis by researchers at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, UK.
The study found that centres offer stem cell treatments for problems such as joint disease, sports injury and arthritis – despite the lack of authoritative research backing such treatments.
According to the analysis published in Frontiers in Public Health, some 44% of websites shown by Google were for treatment centres. Just 22% were for news reports.
The researchers found that most centres offer treatment with stem cells derived from adult tissue, mostly fat tissue. Some 65% of centres were in the USA, 23% were in Asia and 8% in Latin America.
The medical school’s chair in experimental medicine, Professor Pietro Ghezzi said: “Although there is much hope that research on stem cells will lead to new therapies for many diseases, in most cases, the efficacy of stem cell therapy is still being tested clinically. Therefore it was surprising to find so many websites offering clinical treatment.
“Also surprising was the fact that while the news shows an interest in the use of stem cells to cure neurological diseases, existing treatment centres offer, above all, treatment for joints, sport injury or arthritis – all indications for which the efficacy of stem cells have not been completely demonstrated yet.”
Stem cell therapy on the Internet: using Google to analyze public expectations and treatment Frontiers in Public Health December 2017; doi: 10.3389/fict.2017.00028 [abstract]
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