Comparison of Nutech Functional Score with European Stroke Scale for Patients with Cerebrovascular Accident Treated with Human Embryonic Stem Cells: NFS for CVA Patients Treated with hESCs.

Purpose: Stem cell therapy is a promising modality for treatment of patients with chronic cerebrovascular accident (CVA) in whom treatment other than physiotherapy or occupational therapy does not address the repair or recovery of the lost function. In this study, the author aimed at evaluating CVA patients treated with human embryonic stem cell (hESC) therapy and comparing their study outcomes with globally accepted European Stroke Scale (ESS) to that with novel scoring system, Nutech functional score (NFS), a 21-point positional and directional scoring system for assessing patients with CVA.

Materials and methods: Patients diagnosed with CVA were assessed with NFS and ESS before and after hESC therapy. NFS assessed the patients in the direction of 1-5 (bad to good), where 5 was considered as the highest possible grade (HPG). The findings were obtained for the patients who scored HPG, and had shown improvement by at least one grade.

Results: Overall, 66.7% of patients scored HPG level on the NFS scale and about 62.5% of the patients scored HPG according to the ESS scale. Approximately, 52.2% patients showed an improvement of 100% (by at least one grade) on NFS scale. None of the patients showed 100% improvement in the alteration of the score by at least one grade when scored with ESS.

Conclusion: NFS and ESS scores show that a large population of CVA patients was benefitted with hESC therapy. NFS was found to give more convincing results than ESS, and overcomes the shortcomings of ESS.