Advantages Of Umbilical Cord Blood Transplantations
Cord blood transplantations offer many benefits to both donors and recipients, particularly to those with cancer and immune system diseases. Advantages of umbilical cord blood transplantations abound. Here are some of them.
• Collecting umbilical cord blood for transplant is easy and risk-free. This is one of the best advantages of umbilical cord blood transplantations. Before transplantation, umbilical c ord blood is collected from donors during delivery. This collection involves a safe and simple procedure. The cord blood bank staff and other health care specialists gather cord blood from the delivered placenta and umbilical cord of the mother. This procedure does not really affect the mother or her newborn baby, nor does it interfere with the process of giving birth. Therefore, cord blood collection poses no harmful risks to both the mother and the baby.
• Cord blood used for transplant is tested, stored frozen, and ready to use. This is another one of the best advantages of umbilical cord blood transplantations. S ince the umbilical c ord blood is donated and collected in advanced for future use, cord blood banks have enough time to screen and test the blood for infectious diseases. When routine testing is completed, the cord blood unit is stored frozen until it is ready for use. If a match is found for a patient, it can be reserved right away for the transplantation. Umbilical cord blood banking is very efficient and reliable.
• Cord blood transplant does not require a 100 percent perfect match. Umbilical cord blood can be transplanted from the donor to the recipient with only a partial match between the two. This is one of the many advantages of umbilical cord blood transplantations to bone marrow transplants, where a 6/6 HLA match (between the recipient and the donor) is required. In umbilical cord blood transplantations, getting a 3/6 match can already be successful, although patients can do best with a 5/6 donor-recipient match. The transplantation of partially matched umbilical cord blood is acceptable. This procedure provides patients a greater chance of finding an appropriate donor. With cord blood transplantation, a relatively small range of donors can successfully support most of the patient's needs.
• Cord blood poses very little risks of possible complications to the patient. Before storing cord blood, the units are screened and tested for possible containment of infectious virus and bacteria. If it has been discovered that a certain unit is affected by certain kinds of harmful virus, then it is rejected right away. On the other hand, if a cord blood unit is verified to be clean and perfectly healthy, it will then be frozen and kept in liquid nitrogen storage. Only those stored and identified to be infection-free are recommended for umbilical cord transplantation. Hence, such process poses a few, if not totally zero, risk of possible complications to the recipient.