Dr. Neil Riordan on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1066
“And he was 11% ejection fraction. Normal is about 60. And the regular hospital who worked a lot with us with our spinal cord patients and seeing results, seeing people walking again, they just said, you can't get on a plane. You're at 3,700 feet. If you get on a plane, you'll be dead.”
What the evidence says
Riordan describes a single, undocumented patient case (an ejection fraction of 11%, versus a normal range of roughly 55-70%, that per his own account rose to about 42%) as evidence that stem cell infusion can reverse severe heart failure. Controlled clinical research on stem cell therapy for heart failure exists but does not support this kind of dramatic single-anecdote recovery: a 2025 phase 3 randomized controlled trial (PREVENT-TAHA8, published in The BMJ) testing intracoronary mesenchymal stem cell infusion in 396 post-heart-attack patients with reduced ejection fraction found a modest average improvement in ejection fraction (about 6 percentage points more than controls at six months) and a reduced rate of heart-failure hospitalization, but no significant effect on overall mortality. No controlled trial has demonstrated a rapid, near-total recovery of the kind implied by Riordan's anecdote. The American Heart Association's mainstream guidance on heart failure notes that stem cell approaches remain an active research area rather than an established treatment. The specific case Riordan describes has not been published or independently verified, so its diagnosis, treatment, and outcome cannot be confirmed.