When it comes to cord blood transplant you should know that this practice is becoming more and more popular. There are a lot of parents who save the cord blood to make sure that if their baby gets sick, the doctors will be able to treat him or her.
What is the transplant of cord blood?
When the baby is born, the doctors cut the umbilical cord. There is some blood left in the placenta and the umbilical cord attached to it. The baby doesn’t need this blood anymore. This is the blood known as umbilical cord blood or cord blood.
This blood has everything that normal blood does: white blood cells, red blood cells, plasma and platelets. It also comes with hematopoietic stem cells that are similar to the cells of the bone marrow.
This is why this blood can be used for transplants as an alternative for bone marrow.
If you are interested in cord blood transplant, you should know that the majority of the procedures are done in case of patients with immune system or blood diseases. Until now the doctors also performed transplants with patients having metabolic or genetic diseases.
According to the specialists, cord blood could make it possible to replace the cells and tissues of the heart or nerve cells. Further research will also reveal whether these cells can be used to treat other kinds of conditions as well and also the limitations of the use of the cells.
Donating to a public bank
You should know about cord blood transplant that if you donate blood to a public bank you will offer hope to other patients for whom the doctors didn’t find a match or that have no time for the doctors to find a donor for them. As it has been mentioned before, the stem cells can become almost any kind of cell that the body needs.
When looking for a donor for transplant of the baby’s cord blood you should know that the chances of finding a perfect match is relatively low. However the chances are higher in case of family members. Even in this case, the chance to find a donor is of 25% among siblings and it is lower in case of other family members.
If there is no possibility to have a cord blood transplant among relatives, the bone marrow comes in that was used for years. In this case it is possible to find a match even among perfect strangers, but there is need for volunteers to offer their bone marrow to strangers. There are registries for this.
The sad truth is that without stem cell transplant there are a lot of patients who don’t find a donor. This is a big problem in case of the ethnic minority groups. However the good news is that in case of the stem cells the match doesn’t have to be a perfect one.
A baby cord blood transplant is something that you should most definitely consider because it could save the life of other people too.
