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What are You Going to do with
Your Baby's Umbilical Cord?By: Tammi LaTorre
An exciting medical breakthrough has provided a valuable new birth option for expectant parents: the blood from a newborn's umbilical cord, cord blood, is being used as an alternative to bone marrow in the treatment of a number of life-threatening cancers and blood disorders. As the value of umbilical cord blood is becoming clear, expectant parents have begun collecting and storing their newborn's cord blood for the potential future use of their own family.Cord blood is enriched with the same healthy-blood producing cells found in adult bone marrow. Called stem cells, they can be required for a patient who has a damaged blood producing system, either from disease or radical disease treatments, like chemotherapy. The traditional course of action would be a bone marrow transplant.
But bone marrow can be problematic. If a transplant is required, a patient may have to conduct an expensive and time-consuming bone marrow donor search.
If they're able to locate a donor, harvesting the marrow is an expensive surgical procedure, in which the donor must be hospitalized.
By comparison, cord blood is painless for both mother and baby, is relatively inexpensive and is immediately available for use. Studies published in The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine also indicate that cord blood provides for less complication and longer event-free survival after transplant than bone marrow, especially when the cord blood comes from an immediate family member.
Called "biological insurance" by some, family cord blood banking can be of special interest to those parents who have a history of disease in their family, or are uncertain of the history due to their own adoption, or the adoption of their child. Ethnic parents or parents of mixed ethnicity have chosen to bank cord blood because ethnicity's have traditionally had more difficulty in finding bone marrow donors from the public registries. Many parents choose family banking simply because it provides a peace of mind knowing that a related sample of cord blood is available if it should ever be needed.
The cells collected are a 100% match for the newborn, and are generally useful to other family members. Many of the transplants performed to date are sibling to sibling, in which a child is transplanted with the cord blood from their brother or sister, and even a mother was recently treated with her own baby's cord blood.
August 1997
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