Using cord blood as a replacement for marrow now allows people who may not have otherwise have been able to receive a transplant in time to save their lives, go on and live happy lives. This treatment can save the lives of many people who cannot find a matching marrow donor.
These types of transplants use the cells in the cord blood that are missing in the adult blood; it is these cells that allow these types of transplants to be successful. Today, umbilical cord blood banking is becoming popular. Umbilical cord blood banking services are sources of these cells stored for later use by those who may be a match with a certain person’s marrow. This bank of cord blood allows these cells to be readily available for those who need a marrow transplant but have not been able to find a suitable donor.
What generally happens when cord blood is donated is it is tested and stored and the results are entered into a database. When a doctor needs a transplant for a patient, he can get in touch with this database and see if there is a match for the patient.
The cord blood itself is stored in an extremely cold freezer — generally 180 degrees Celsius. These conditions allow the cord blood to be stored for a longer period of time, but since it is a fairly new technology, it is not known exactly how long cord blood can be stored.
The umbilical cord blood is generally thrown away after birth. Collecting or donating this blood to an umbilical cord blood banking service causes no harm to your child and is of no cost to you to donate. It is generally done by the following process: after the baby is born, the nurse will take the placenta to a room where she will gather the cord blood into a blood bag to be sent and stored, awaiting someone who may need those stem cells for a transplant to save his or her life.
Umbilical cord blood banking services often recruit expecting mothers to donate their babies’ umbilical cord blood to a bank to be used for stem cell transplants.
This small, harmless step for you and your child may save a life. Many people with life-threatening diseases, such as leukemia, need these stem cells in order to get a transplant to survive. What happens, for example with leukemia, is the patient undergoes chemotherapy to kill all their bad or malfunctioning cells; they then undergo surgery to transplant the new healthy cells into their system, commonly saving the patient’s life.
You may also be considering the option of saving the umbilical cord blood to be used later if your child gets sick. Although on the surface this may seem like a viable option, it usually is not. This is because if the child is sick, its own cord blood would most likely also contain the same bad cells the child has now so, most often, it would be of no help to them in this type of situation.
By Lauren Culliton