In the process of welcoming the new life, the expectant parents are like escalating monsters, in addition to dealing with various small accidents in the obstetric examination, they must also prepare maternity bags, and even arrange postpartum matters. But if you think it's enough to prepare for that, you're wrong.
Looking at the entire maternal and infant market, the focus of many expectant mothers is no longer on the physical objects that can be prepared before childbirth, but on whether it is necessary to prepare postpartum "intangible assets" - cord blood storage. Many expectant mothers ask: I heard that the value of cord blood is very high, and I am about to give birth to a baby, whether I want to store it.
Xiaobian is here to responsibly tell everyone that cord blood storage is really useful! useful! useful! The answers to all four questions about cord blood are written to you!
Q1: What is the use of cord blood?
Judging from the "age" of cord blood application, it is already a mature "adult" - as early as the 1920s, ENDE et al. first reported cord blood stem cell transplantation; in 1988, the world's first cord blood transplant case was successful, which really opened the prelude to the application of cord blood stem cells [1].
In recent years, with the deepening of research, the advantages of cord blood stem cells such as multi-directional differentiation potential and strong renewal ability have gradually been discovered, and the clinical value is huge. Scientific experiments have shown that cord blood contains many types of stem cells, mainly including hematopoietic stem cells, mesenchymal stem cells, endothelial master cells, etc. [2]. Hematopoietic stem cells are a type of stem cells with high content in umbilical cord blood, which can be matured in the treatment of various blood and immune system diseases such as aplastic anemia and acute myeloid leukemia; mesenchymal stem cells can be induced to differentiate into osteoblasts, chondrocytes, fat cells, nerve cells and hepatoid cells under certain conditions, showing a good prospect in the treatment of bone defects, cardiovascular diseases, cirrhosis, autoimmune diseases, and degenerative diseases.
At present, cord blood stem cell related technologies have been applied in the treatment of more than 80 diseases, including leukemia, aplastic anemia, children's type I diabetes, cerebral palsy, autism and so on.
By the end of 2020, the cumulative application of cord blood in China exceeded 16,000 cases, and tens of thousands of families had gained new life because of cord blood.
Q2: Will obtaining cord blood affect your baby?
Cord blood is the blood that remains in the placenta and umbilical cord after the baby has been delivered out of the broken umbilical cord and left. Hospitals will treat the placenta cord directly as medical waste after the woman gives birth or collect the cord blood for storage at the request of the woman.
Collecting cord blood not only does not harm the baby, but also does not have any impact on the health of new mothers. Due to the particularity of cord blood collection and the importance of storage, cord blood collection personnel have undergone professional collection training and will strictly follow the cord blood collection process.
Q3: How and how much does it cost to store cord blood?
After adding cryoprotectants to cool down, cord blood is eventually placed in a liquid nitrogen tank for cryopreservation to keep cord blood cells active.
At present, in the current policy of "one province and one library" in China, there are only seven cord blood banks in Beijing, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Shandong, Sichuan, Shanghai, Tianjin and other places that have obtained the national blood station practice license and are formally practiced, and each cord blood bank is set up with an autologous bank and a public library.
Among them, the public bank stores the cord blood donated by the maternal family, mainly for patients who need cord blood hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, and the donor can match in the public bank with the donation voucher and obtain the right of priority matching when needed in the future. Since the public bank cord blood is mainly used for patients who are not related, and there are more risks such as rejection in the treatment, the evaluation criteria for the public bank cord blood will be higher; the autologous bank stores the cord blood stored by the family at their own expense, providing self-use services for the owner of the cord blood and his family, and the storage cost includes a one-time preparation test fee and an annual storage fee, with a total price of about 20,000 yuan (this fee price is only for reference only, and the charges in different regions are not the same).
Q4: Will the money spent on storing cord blood be lost?
In a narrow sense, cord blood can only be applied to leukemia hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, but in fact, cord blood stem cell transplantation technology has been widely used for the treatment of more than 80 diseases in 11 categories such as leukemia, aplastic anemia, thalassemia, lymphoma, etc., and some people have questioned: the probability of babies suffering from these diseases seems to be a little low.
Dear Mom-to-Be, cord blood can not only be applied to cord blood owners, but also to family members. Taking the Beijing Cord Blood Bank as an example, in the past five years, there have been many cases in the cord blood bank where the umbilical cord blood of the child has cured the father's acute myeloid leukemia, the umbilical cord blood of the younger brother has cured the brother's mucopolysaccharide storage disease, and the baby's umbilical cord blood has cured the mother's aplastic anemia. These cases illustrate that we store cord blood not just for our children, but for ourselves – a life insurance policy available to the whole family.
With the development of medicine, many fields of "incurable diseases" have been overcome, the scope of application of cord blood has expanded from blood diseases to bronchopulmonary dysplasia in preterm infants, type I diabetes, children's neurodevelopmental disorders, elderly neurodegenerative diseases and other fields, and the application scope of cord blood has also been expanded in adults.
According to the available data, the vitality of cord blood stem cells has not been lost due to cryopreservation: on October 22, 2021, the Beijing Cord Blood Bank, one of the seven cord blood banks in China, sampled a copy of cord blood frozen on June 15, 1998, and the activity of hematopoietic stem cells after resuscitation was as high as 98.70%. This 23 years and 4 months of cord blood is a further proof of the standardization and reliability of the preservation quality of the cord blood bank.
After understanding the above content, I believe that expectant parents have their own judgment on whether cord blood needs to be stored. From a cost-effective point of view, a life insurance can protect the safety of the entire family from multiple dimensions, which is indeed a wise choice. If the family's financial conditions permit, it is advisable to say "yes" when the medical staff asks "whether to consider storing cord blood".
Finally, I wish that expectant parents can successfully welcome the birth of the baby, good pregnancy is always there, and the new life is safe!
Resources:
【1】ENDE M，ENDE N．Hematopoietic transplantation by means of fetal （cord） blood． A new method ［J］． Virginia Medical Monthly， 1918，99（3）：276－280．
【2】 ISHIKAWA F， YASUKAWA M， LYONS B， et al． Development of functional human blood and immune systems in NOD ／ SCID ／ IL2 receptor chainnull mice ［J］．血液学杂志 ，2005，106（5）：1565－1573.
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After reading this article, will you store cord blood?
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