Welcoming your newborn into your family is an exciting time, padded with endless decisions and responsibilities. Not only are you concerned about the meeting your baby’s needs, but you also have to plan constantly to ensure a high quality of life for your child throughout his or her early life.
Cord blood banking is one of the best decisions you can make for your baby that can positively impact his or her health in the future. When your baby is born, the doctor can extract blood left over from the umbilical cord and you can have it stored at a reliable cord blood bank for possible use if your child ever becomes seriously ill.
In this article, we’ll take a look at what this procedure entails and how long the blood will last.
What Is Cord Blood Banking?
Cord blood banking is the storage of a small amount of blood from the umbilical cord after the delivery of your baby. The blood is rich in stem cells and is appreciated for its amazing health intervention benefits.
The blood is stored and used to treat life-threatening diseases such as cancer and degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. Should the need ever arise, cord blood gets injected into the bloodstream and will naturally flow to the areas that need healing.
If your child faces a situation that requires the blood for treatment, it is readily available. Inspection Lifebank Cord Blood frequently shares positive outcomes of children who have benefited from their parents’ decisions to make use of cord blood banking.
Blood from bone marrow contains the same stem cells that are found in the umbilical cord. But cord blood banking is less invasive, time-efficient and sometimes more effective. It is notoriously painful to go through the process of drawing bone marrow blood. Apart from that, it is time-consuming and steals precious time that could have been used for treatment.
Should your child ever need the blood you stored for them, it will just be a matter of getting straight to the treatment process without having to engage in other medical procedures.
Now that we better understand what cord blood banking is, let’s take a look at how long the blood will last once you store it.
Preservation Process
When the blood is drawn from the umbilical cord, it is stored in a frozen preserved state. The blood lasts in this state for many decades and there is no expiry date. Current research at Indiana School University of Medicine shows that efficient cell recovery was recorded after having stored the blood for 23.5 years. Further research and medical trials have to be done to determine the longest stretch that the blood can be stored and still produce positive results.
Staff Competence
How long the blood can be stored depends on the competence of the staff members that were involved in the initial process. When the blood is collected, certain tests are done before storage. These stages have to be handled with caution. Failure to do so means that the blood may be compromised, and might not yield positive results when it’s needed. Therefore, it’s important to engage with cord blood banking entities that are highly professional and have positive reviews from clients that have worked with them.
Storage Quality
The quality of storage plays a role in determining how long the blood lasts in good form. The freezing temperatures have to be constant, and the apparatus must be handled with care. Again, banking with a trusted entity is the only way you can ensure you access effective blood if the need arises.
Family/ Public Banks
If in the future, if you or your adult child decides that there is no need for the blood, it will never go to waste. The stored blood can be used by any other family member. One of the advantages of cord blood banking is that one doesn’t have to be an exact blood match to receive the blood for treatment. Your baby’s blood could save another family member’s life.
Alternatively, you can donate the blood to a public cord blood bank. The fact that one doesn’t have to be an exact match for the blood means unrelated patients can benefit from the blood.
Conclusion
Cord blood banking is an important decision that can assist your child in possible future ill-health situations. Cord blood has positively affected the lives of patients with spinal injuries and even autism.
The blood can be stored for over 20 years and can be made available to other family members if your child doesn’t need it. Either way, your baby’s blood will never go to waste.
In today’s uncertain world, investing in your child’s future through cord blood banking is one of the best decisions you can make as a parent.
