Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Saving the Cord Blood

Just like when I was pregnant with the boys, I spend lots of time during this pregnancy watching those always available baby shows. They seem to be on all. day. long. I kind of have a love/hate relationship with them, mainly because they rarely show birth stories like my boys', just the happy-go-lucky ones where a nice, healthy baby comes right on time. But I watch anyway. And since I watch, I've seen umpteen commercials about saving your baby's cord blood for future use. And while it would definitely be a good thing for Baby C if he ever needed it, I've found through a lot of research that Clayton may benefit as well. Doctors at Duke University are experimenting with treating Cerebral Palsy with the stem cells found in umbilical cord blood. The catch right now is that they only use the child's very own cord blood for the treatment. But with the way medical research goes these days, we're hoping that the use of a sibling's cord blood becomes one of their treatments. It's definitely not a cure-all, but any improvement we could see in Clayton would be well worth the money spent on banking the cord blood. You can't help but get excited by watching the videos of children who have already undergone treatment.

1 comment:

Jennifer Ortiz said...

We have discussed that if we ever are brave enough to have another child we would save the cord blood for sure. Any help Jude could get from the stem cells would be wonderful