COURTESY WHITE CLOUD Big Island resident Penny Thomas, center, is the first American to be treated for Parkinson's using stem cells at the Tiantan Puhua Neurosurgical Hospital in China, according to the hospital. With Thomas are Dr. Sherwood Yang, left, vice president of Tiantan Puhua hospital; and Hong Shen, called "Annie," also a doctor and pharmacist.

Stem cells help treat Big Isle woman

Surgery in China reduced symptoms of Parkinson's

Three million stem cells deposited in her brain in China have given her life back, says a Big Island woman with debilitating Parkinson's disease.

Before the surgery May 16 in the Tiantan Puhua Neurosurgical Hospital in Beijing, said Penny Thomas, "I was watching myself die."

The 53-year-old from Captain Cook is the only known American successfully treated with stem cell therapy for Parkinson's disease, according to the Tiantan Puhua hospital.

Scientists from the Stem Cell Research Center at Beijing University delivered stem cells to the hospital for her surgery from a donor's retina, she said. The cost for surgery and a two-month stay in China: $26,000.

"I'm doing wonderfully," she said in a telephone interview from her home.

She's swimming, riding horseback, running, jogging and driving. "My life has totally changed back into being normal," she said.

Dr. Cliff Arrington, her doctor in Kealakekua, said: "It's just unbelievable what's happened to her. ... She had advanced Parkinson's with severe tremors and was becoming progressively worse in spite of all the alternative treatments we were doing."

When she mentioned stem cells, he said he encouraged her to look into it and she made arrangements to go to China.

"I heard she was over there. The next thing I knew, she was walking into my office almost like a completely normal person. I didn't even recognize her at first," Arrington said.

It wasn't just that her long hair was gone, but "she was walking steady without any tremors and her voice was not quivering," Arrington said.

Thomas said she began having symptoms of Parkinson's nearly 10 years ago, but wasn't diagnosed with the disease until about five years ago. Initially, "(I) thought I just had a pinched nerve or something," she said. "It started as a tremor in my foot and it came and went. I kind of ignored it."

Parkinson's is a brain disorder that occurs when certain nerve cells that produce dopamine, a chemical responsible for the body's movements, malfunction or die.

Thomas said she was "living on sheer willpower" before the surgery. Her husband, Robert, and their 15-year-old daughter, Cheyenne, "were my support team," she said.

They had to help her do almost everything, including cutting up her food, getting dressed and undressed, and taking a shower.

"Getting ready for bed would take almost an hour every night. I tried everything holistically possible and finally went to different doctors. I tried medications. They weren't working for me," she said.

She kept hearing about stem cells as she talked to various people and began doing research on the Internet, she said. Her husband, a home remodeler and flight instructor, finally found different avenues of therapy, she said.

European countries were using injections to treat the neurological disease and she planned to go to Holland to have that done, she said. But doctors there didn't respond to her e-mail or telephone messages, she said.

"I was kind of getting frustrated. We weren't making connections, so I decided to go back online to see what else would come up."

Then she saw the Web site stemcellschina.com. She e-mailed for information in February or March and received an immediate response, she said.

They asked for some medical history, which she immediately sent, she said.

They referred her to the Tiantan Puhua Neurosurgical Hospital, a small American-owned hospital in Beijing, because Parkinson's was a new avenue for stem-cell therapy, she said.

Thirteen patients with the disease had received stem-cell treatments before her, she said. "But I'm the first American and the first one that they're tracking and considered a very successful story."

The hospital sent her an e-mail suggesting stereotaxis brain stem cell injection surgery. A three-dimensional guidance system is used to target the deep brain for an injection through a small incision in the skull.

"I'm kind of a person who volunteers for things," Thomas said. So, after doing more research, "I told my husband, 'I'm going to do this,'" and he agreed.

Once she made the decision, she said, "I felt I was being guided by angels. Things started coming into alignment for me."

Her husband couldn't go with her, but Felizia Saunders, a waitress at a local restaurant, had always wanted to go to China to make a business connection and volunteered to accompany her, she said.

"They drilled a hole in my skull to insert a 12-inch needle into the center of my brain, to the putamen part of my brain. Mine was atrophied. The surgeon said it was the smallest he ever saw in his life. He feels I was born that way."

The 1 1/2-hour procedure by Dr. Xiaodi Han was so precise that he had two computers marking the exact spot to put the stem cells, she said.

She reports regularly to the Tiantan Puhua Hospital and is slowly reducing her medications under the Chinese neurological team's guidance and with Dr. Arrington, she said. The hospital would like her to return there in May to check on the stem cells, she said.

Stem-cell treatment can't eliminate all symptoms of Parkinson's disease, the hospital said, "but Penny's shaking was greatly reduced, muscle tension disappeared, her strength increased, movement became more fluid and her freeze-ups stopped."

Dr. Sherwood Yang, the hospital's vice president, said in a news release: "Our medical solution gives a new ray of hope for all patients around the world suffering from formerly untreatable neural diseases like Parkinson's, cerebral palsy and stroke."

Sometimes she has tremors again because she's cutting back on the medicine, Thomas said, "so the stem cells are having to kick in and do their job now."