Your Childrens Health

In the past, the umbilical cord and placenta were discarded after childbirth without a second thought.  Recently though, the benefits of saving this blood have become quite apparent.

Without getting too technical, this blood contains stem cells.  Stem cells have the unique ability to develop into three different kinds of mature blood cells: white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets.  How is this important to the health of your child?

If your child develops an illness, such as leukemia, the treatment could be very damaging to their blood cells.  Chemotherapy and radiation, while they work to kill ‘bad’ cells, can also damage healthy cells in the process.  As the cells in the bone marrow are attacked, the child may require a bone marrow transplant from a donor.  Using their own cells to create healthy new ones is the best way to deal with this type of problem.

In order to save and bank your child’s cord blood, you must make arrangements ahead of time.  The material can be collected with both vaginal and c-section deliveries, but the kit must be present at the time of the birth.  Vaginal births usually yield a greater amount of cord blood and therefore a greater amount of stem cells. 

After they are collected, the blood cells are cryogenically stored until a time when they may be needed.  Since this practice hasn’t been studied in great detail, there are no exact figures outlining the chances that your child will ever need to use their stem cells.  However, if your family has a history of serious illness, banking your child’s cord blood is something that you may want to seriously consider.

The average expense for banking cord blood is about $1500, plus $100 per year maintenance fee.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 21st, 2006 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.