With today's technology, after a baby's birth, you can save the
umbilical cord.
An advantage of umbilical cord saving
is for a future transplant or bone marrow should the child ever need it.
An example is that high radiation and chemotherapy used to treat cancer
now also kills good cells in the bone marrow. Those patients need
bone marrow transplants to survive this drastic treatment. If the
patient had his own umbilical cord blood, it could be used to regenerate
their bone marrow that was free of cancer cells.
You would want to seriously consider umbilical cord
banking if the newborn baby's family has a history of diseases that may
require a bone marrow transplant. Some of these
diseases are: leukemia or lymphoma, aplastic anemia, severe sickle cell
anemia, and severe combined immune deficiency (SCID), which a rare type
of immune deficiency.
Keep in mind that you will have only once chance in the minutes following the babies
birth to collect and save your baby's umbilical cord blood. This
one decision may help protect your child from a long list of life
threatening diseases far into the future.
Your baby's umbilical cord blood is an abundant source of life-giving
stem cells like those found in bone marrow. Cord blood stem cells are
now being used to treat over 70 diseases with many more on the horizon.
Sadly, cord blood is often discarded at birth and lost forever. But now,
like so many new parents, you can safely store it for the unexpected.
