A Middleton man whose angina is so severe that he gets chest pains watching the Badgers play basketball has become the first person in the state to join a stem cell clinical trial that uses patients’ own cells to treat their heart disease.
“A good basketball game is a three-nitro game for me,” Steve Myrah, 68, of Middleton, said of the number of nitroglycerin tablets he typically takes to ease the pain during a game.
In the trials, doctors at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics and other locations will harvest adult stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow and inject them into blood-deprived areas of the heart.