There is some important timing involved in the decision of umbilical cord blood banking. When you were expecting your baby people would ask which you wanted boy or girl a stock answer was the norm. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s healthy. So you deliver your baby to the world maybe anxious about it’s Apgar score maybe not but if it’s healthy your dreams for him or her immediately turn to different thoughts of the future of your baby. As you hold your baby for the first time you may envision the future filed with happy life events baby’s first words or baby’s first steps, birthdays. For some the glories of a life well lived come to mind. Rewarding careers, achievements that you as parents will be proud of someday.

Umbilical cord blood collection takes place as soon as practical after baby is born.

Now that you have your healthy baby in your arms your thoughts are not likely not turn to the serious matter of " what if my baby becomes seriously ill ? That’s a good thing too this joyous moment is no time to be thinking such thoughts. The time to have given serious attention to this possibility was in the time leading up to the birth. More and more, soon to be parents are doing just that. They are considering saving cord blood not out of some worry wart mentality but because this is something you can do to insure against a worst case scenario.

Quickie film clip saving cord blood saving lives.

Unlike your parents and their parents you now have the option to take steps that take into consideration the possibility of serious illness striking your newborn. The decision might also impact the outcome of illness that might strike the older siblings of that infant for whom this was not done. That decision is to arrange for umbilical cord blood banking.

Umbilical cord blood banking or cord blood storage may prove one day to be the best decision you ever made about your child’s health care. Immediately after a newborn is delivered, a mother’s body no longer having a need for it releases the placenta. This organ was always meant to have only an existence while you needed to nourish the child in the womb. The placenta’s role in the process was to transfer oxygen and vital nutrients to the baby as it grew in uterus. The placenta provides some of the stem cell yielding blood too and this may make saving cord blood a bit of a misnomer.

In the not so distant past the umbilical cord and the placenta were considered medical waste if you will. As such it was simply and without much thought discarded. In the seventies that all began to change when medical research yielded up the breakthrough discovery that umbilical cord blood could provide could be a supply of stem cells. Stem cells and stem cell research gets a lot of attention in the media of course. many are all too familiar with it especially with the political controversy that swirls around it. The kinds of stem cells that can be retrieved from the umbilical cord is the blood forming type. These are sometimes life saving as are the stem cells of bone marrow donor fame.   

Here’s the really great part of all this. Your baby gets to be it’s own donor painlessly when these cells from it’s own umbilical cord blood are preserved with care. They are later able to provide cells that are a perfect match. Why is all of this so exciting ? Just think about the diseases that you can take some guard against. A caution here which we will talk at length in the blog about is that some blood will be ruled out for use if a baby is born with a condition and those cells may also carry the disease.

Why are you even thinking of cord blood collection ?  The reason is that these are the basic blood forming cells capable of developing into any or all of the three types of mature blood cells in our bodies. We all remember from high school biology we have platelets, red blood cells, and white blood cells. What’s more, these stem cells are currently undergoing promising research in the area of their potential to be used to become other types of cells in our bodies.

There are some very effective tools that doctor’s have available to them to help us win in our struggles against some very serious life threatening diseases. In the case of immune system disorders, cancer and several blood diseases harsh remedy indeed is required. Radiation therapy and chemotherapy are the two that everyone knows can have the serious effect of killing cells that are necessary to our children’s health. That includes the healthy cells in the bone marrow. It is this lack of discrimination in cell killing that makes these treatments often dangerous and always unpleasant.

In the case of several diseases and  the necessary treatment of a child the war is still not won  when the disease is controlled. The child who has had these therapies will have to undergo an operation to re-populate the cells indiscriminately destroyed by the treatment. That is what bone marrow donation is and it requires that the cells donated be a close match to the recipients cells. The closer the better for best results and this is why family members are usually the first source turned to for the donation.

When the donation is successful the donated cells get to do the important work of making new cells that are healthy and unaffected by the now completed chemotherapy or radiation therapy. These new healthy cells are now the cells that enable the child to produce blood that works well at it’s vital functions and they also help to enhance the immune system’s ability to ward off attacks. 

In the case of umbilical cord blood banking the collection of the cord blood will take place immediately after birth. This is true regardless of the method of delivery. Here is why you want to be thinking about this in the month’s leading up to your delivery date, the collection is done using a  kit made for the purpose. Parents make arrangements for the umbilical cord blood storage must order ahead of time with their cord banking choice.

In the matter of vaginal delivery, the umbilical cord is clamped on and cut it is clamped of course on both sides before cutting to make sure the blood is contained therein. In cases where saving cord blood has been decided upon hospital staff are made aware. Well trained and knowing that this will be part of their duties  the doctor or obstetric nurse collects the cord blood before the placenta is delivered. One end of your baby’s umbilical cord is unclamped, then a small tube is passed into the umbilical vein and the blood is collected. Next after the blood has been captured from the cord, needles are placed on the side of the surface of the placenta where it had been connected to the fetus to collect more blood and cells from the large blood vessels that fed the fetus.

In the case of birth by C-section umbilical cord blood collection is somewhat more complicated because the obstetrician’s main focus is tending to the surgical concerns of the mother and so after the baby has been  delivered and the mother’s uterus has been sutured, then the umbilical cord blood will be collected. Unfortunately it is true that less cord blood is usually collected when delivery is by c-section. The amount of cord blood collected is critical because the more collected, the more stem cells are later harvested. Should the use of the stem cells ever become a necessity, having more to implant increases the chances of  success.

Just after cord blood collection, the blood after being placed into special bags and/or syringes is taken usually by courier to the umbilical cord blood banks. Once there, the sample is given an identification number. Then the stem cells are separated from the rest of the cordblood and are stored in a frozen state in liquid nitrogen. This is what stored cryogenically means. You have made an important deposit in the umbilical cord blood banking system one that is certainly as important as any you’ll make to the financial banking system for your child’s educational needs down the line.

Evening news story about cordblood storage.

This of course is more analogous to taking an insurance policy. Always good to have but hope you never need it. In the event  they are needed, your baby’s frozen blood forming stem cells can be thawed and used. Here we get back to an earlier mention of siblings advantaged by your new baby’s umbilical blood cord banking. This blood will match your baby but there is also a very high likelihood it will be usable by a sibling in need or an other close relative. 

More good news here for you. Theoretically if the stem cells are properly stored there is no reason to believe that they will not be useful indefinitely for the purpose intended. That is to help make life giving new blood. This is a little speculative since there have been samples only since the start of umbilical cord blood collection as we mentioned in the seventies. Stem cells that were more than ten years old  have been used with success in transplants.

This web site is except for this homepage in the form of a weblog or blog. In many of the blog entries we talk to specific matters and  facts related to umbilical blood cord banking.