Stem Cell Preservation

In the past decade, most new parents have been given a choice of banking their baby’s cord blood or donating it to a public storage bank.  This is a once in a lifetime opportunity that is available when your baby is born and before the umbilical cord is discarded.  Collecting cord blood from the umbilical cord is a five minute procedure and will not hurt the mother or more importantly, the baby.   Umbilical cord blood stem cells are now being used to treat many malignant and non-malignant diseases and new uses for stem cells are being discovered everyday!

A lot of people ask why they should preserve cord blood and the answer is simple.  As most women are aware, during pregnancy the umbilical cord is the lifeline between mothers and their unborn babies.  Most of the time, after the delivery the umbilical cord is cut and then discarded.  The stem cells that are in the cord blood are also discarded.   These stem cells are an exact genetic match for the child.  If you were to preserve them, you would be guaranteeing your child a source of perfectly matched stem cells in the event that they were to develop a life threatening disease that could be treated using these cells.

Stem cells are used to treat a variety of diseases such as leukemia, Hodgkin’s disease, along with other cancers, blood diseases and some immune system disorders.  Researchers are striving to make stem cell transplants of use in fighting AIDS, Lupus, lung cancer and Multiple Sclerosis. The reason why they are so valuable is that stem cells have been known as the building blocks of blood and the immune system and also other tissues in our bodies.   They can also transform into other cell types such as red blood cells and white blood cells and platelets.  This is what makes them so valuable.   They can replace other cells in our body that are abnormal, weakened or ruined by disease. In fact one of the main uses of stem cells is to replace abnormal bone marrow cells.