Umbilical Cord Stem Cells – Essential for Successful Transplants
Have you already lived through the anger and frustration of losing a relative to leukemia or a related type of cancer? Are you worried about what will happen if your future child were to develop the same disease? Stem cells are the basic building blocks that goes into every muscle, tissue, organ and bone in the body. They are master cells, like a blank slate that can be turned into what every the DNA dictates. However, when stem cells or bone marrow becomes diseased, they can quickly spread cancer to many parts of the body as well. Many have begun to save umbilical cord stem cells at birth as a way to proactively fight this fate.
Although the utilization of stem cells has been very controversial over the past decade, it’s important to realize that harvesting umbilical cord stem cells at birth doesn’t require any sacrifice on the part of the baby or the mother. When a mother gives birth, the umbilical cord is still attached to the baby at the belly button. This cord is used to pass nutrients and oxygen to the fetus while it’s still in the womb, but when the child is born, the cord is no longer needed.
For many years, doctors just severed the umbilical cord and discarded it after birth, thinking that it no longer served any purpose to the child or mother. What has only been discovered recently is that the cord contains multipotent-stem-cell-rich blood that can be more successful in treating cancer and other chronic conditions that used to be treated (less effectively) with bone marrow stem cells and PBSCs. Simply by harvesting and storing the blood at birth, you’ll be taking a step to protect the health of your family members for years to come.
The reason that umbilical cord stem cells are so important to potential treatment and recovery from cancer and other conditions is that they have not yet had a chance to develop the features that typically cause host cells to attack and destroy the donated stem cells or bone marrow. If mature stem cells are like blank slate cells, the umbilical stem cells are like baby blank slates. They don’t yet have the mature immune cells that usually trigger an attack by the host’s cells, they have less of a chance of causing graft versus host disease, which can cause nausea, extreme pain, skin rashes, and even death.
What is Cord Blood?
