Why Should I Save My Baby’s Cord Blood?
During pregnancy, the umbilical cord serves a vital function - it delivers oxygenated, nutrient-rich blood from the placenta to your developing baby. In the past, both the umbilical cord and placenta were discarded after delivery. If the umbilical cord and placenta are discarded, you lose the chance to preserve the precious stem cells that they contain.
By saving your child's cord blood, he or she will have a guaranteed match of stem cells that may be used in the event that threatening illness develops. A healthy person's stem cells continually replenish their blood cells and immune system cells. Medical treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation destroy the body's ability to do this alone; however, new stem cells from a cord blood transplant can help rebuild these systems. Stem cells can also be used to repair and regenerate new tissue.
Currently, cord blood stem cells are used to treat over 75 diseases, and your child's cord blood could potentially preserve their health or the health of another family member should they be affected by one of them. These diseases include various Leukemias, aplastic anemia, Hodgkin's disease, sickle cell anemia, Tay Sach's disease, breast cancer, brain tumors, small-cell lung cancer, and other cancers. Additionally, researchers are actively exploring potential future applications including the treatment of diabetes, heart disease, liver disease, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's.
Stem cells can also be transferred from one person to another through bone marrow transplants, but cord blood transplants hold several advantages over this method. Bone marrow transplants require the donor and recipient to be a perfect or almost perfect HLA genetic match. This can make locating a sample quite difficult. There is a national registry in place, but there is no guarantee that a match will be found. It can also be extremely difficult to find a match if your ethnic group is underrepresented in national registries. Sometimes members of the same family are a genetic match, but again this is not guaranteed. Bone marrow transplants can also be a risky and painful procedure for both the donor and the recipient.
Umbilical cord blood stem cells are looked on favorably by transplant specialists because they can eliminate many of the problems associated with bone marrow transplants. For instance, your child's umbilical cord blood stem cells are their guaranteed perfect genetic match. Also, HLA type genetic matching requirements of cord blood stem cells are not as demanding as bone marrow's, which means it is more likely to find a match between family members. And after transplant, the chances of rejection are less with umbilical cord blood stem cells than they are with the stem cells from bone marrow.
