Tuesday, January 10, 2012

All You Need To Know About Cord Blood Banking

By Adriana Noton


As far as medical technologies go, cord blood banking is one that is fairly recent. Despite this fact, it has been shown to have great potential in terms of treatment of a number of otherwise hard to treat conditions such as cancer and heart disease. This form of medicine is fascinating to many people for many reasons.

When one needs to bank such blood, they would need to collect it first. This is normally done immediately after the birth of a neonate. When the umbilicus is cut, the doctors collect a small volume of blood from the child's end of the cord.

Once it has been drawn, the fluid is then stored by freezing to very low temperatures. Unlike plasma and other similar products, this particular type of blood can usually be stored indefinitely if cryogenically frozen. This means that it's possible to build vast stores of such tissue.

As has been noted above, this form of medicine is relatively new. However, it has been proven to be potentially beneficial in most areas of medicine. As of now, the most common reason why one would want to store such tissue is so as to make it easier to treat some conditions such as cancer in future.

For this reason, it's common to find most parents considering cryogenically storing such tissue so as to ensure that their children have some form of treatment in case they suffer from such diseases. This is because some diseases such as leukemia can be treated by stem cells from such tissue. This is done in a process known as autologous transplantation.

If you are expecting a child, it therefore makes sense to make provisions for the use of such technology. In order to do it, all you need to do is consult your doctor, who can then arrange for the process to be done when you give birth. Quite a number of medical institutions in the developed world have such facilities, so finding one should not be too hard.

One thing you need to know about this form of medicine is that since it is relatively young, there is not enough legislation governing its use in a number of states. However, the fact that it has great potential in helping treat a number of conditions means that more and more states are recognizing it. This means that an increasing number of such legal jurisdictions are enacting laws to try and govern the use of this technology.

At the end of the day, cord blood banking is something that can no longer be ignored due to the potential benefits it affords most people. When you take advantage of such technology, you can easily make sure that your children have a way of treating some of the most common diseases such as cancer. This is therefore one way of taking care of your child's health right from day one of their life. One should therefore always consider it when they are planning on having children later on.




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