الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is a chronic condition mostly due to atherosclerosis. Risk factors involved in the development of PAD include mainly smoking, diabetes, hypercholesterolemia and hypertension. In its severest form, PAD is presented by critical limb ischemia (CLI) which is defined according to TASC II as persistently recurring ischemic rest pain requiring regular and adequate analgesia for more than 2 weeks, ulceration or gangrene of the foot or the toes with ankle systolic pressure of less than 50 mmHg or a toe systolic pressure of less than 30 mmHg. This applied to diabetic and non diabetic patients and this is the most recently used definition. The majority of patients with PAD remains stable with medical treatment, but between 15% and 25% of these patients will progress to require either revascularization or amputation. Revascularization is mainly based on either surgical bypass or percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTA), which is increasing as a first option for revascularization and both require the presence of distal runoff. About 20%-30% of cases are associated with sever diffuse atherosclerosis with absence of distal runoff. In this case or after the failure of previous revascularization attempts, medical treatment remains the only therapeutic option available prior to amputation. In this subset of patients, as the anatomy is unsuitable for revascularization either surgically or by PTA, alternative methods of revascularization are needed. Cell based therapies offer a promising solution. The aim of this study is to outline the biology of stem cells in general regarding their types and some about their uses in medicine focusing mainly on the vascular stem cell and its use as a new choice for treatment of peripheral arterial disease and to point out different techniques for stem cell injection.