Archive for the ‘Cord Blood’ Category
Cord Blood Registry – A Key Phenomenon in Life Science!
Undoubtedly, a stage has come where stem cells stored in a cord blood registry are playing an important role in treating many diseases and injuries. Some physicians rightly termed such cord blood stem cells as building blocks of the body. For finding out the treatments possible with cord blood cells, these cells have continuously gone through many experiments. After a long research, doctors have reached at some effective and low cost treatments for problems like blindness, diabetes, spinal cord diseases and injuries, neurons’ disease, cognitive disorders, Parkinson’s diseases, Alzheimer’s disease etc. All these problems can be efficiently treated with the help of stem cell transplants.
Cord Blood Registry is a kind of Life Insurance
Umbilical cord-blood stem cells are highly effective in treating various blood disorders of people including children and adults. Earlier, such treatments required bone-marrow transplants. The stem cells from newborn’s umbilical cord have about 25 percent chances to match with genetic cells of its siblings or parents. Moreover, there are no drawbacks associated with cord blood stem cell transplants as with other transplant treatments. One of the major reactions associated with organ transplants is graft Vs host reaction that may even result in death of the patient. Thus, cord blood storage is really an effective way to insure the lives of all family members.
Procedure involved in cord blood registry
Cord blood collection process starts with cutting and clamping of umbilical cords pre-delivery or post-delivery. Let’s discuss all the steps one-by-one:
• First of all, parents have to sign an approval form.
• Mother will then undergo a blood test and general check-up to make sure that she is completely fit and eligible for donating cord blood.
• After baby’s delivery, the cord blood is collected by the doctors. Umbilical cord is cut and clamped and a needle is instilled into the umbilical vein. To collect the umbilical cells, there is a special bag that is designed specifically for this purpose.
• The process of cord blood collection takes around 10 to 12 minutes.
• Within 2 days (48 hours), collected blood has to be shifted to the cord blood registry or bank. Here, it is preserved for future use.
Before preserving the cord blood stem cells, some tests are undertaken to make sure that the cells are free from diseases such as AIDS and malaria. Molecular tests are also carried out to determine cells’ HLA (or Human Leukocyte Antigens).