Following the fire of "The World of Man", the premiere of "Dear Child", which was released on April 10, won the first place in the national ratings. Although Tadpole Jun has not seen it, it has been screened by Weibo, Little Red Book, Douyin and other platforms for many days, and netizens commented that this drama is "real to the point of panic"!
The climax of this drama also has to start from the episode 14 (front spoiler) The heroine's daughter was diagnosed with leukemia, after waiting for the bone marrow matching fruitless, the doctor finally said another "earth-shattering secret", suggesting that the heroine and her ex-husband have another baby and use the umbilical cord blood of the newborn to save the daughter's life.
Screenshot of the TV series
This bridge section has triggered a heated discussion among many netizens and mothers, and there is a great controversy about whether cord blood can really save lives.
Look at the hot discussion of netizens
So, what exactly is cord blood? Can a critical moment really save lives? Is it worth saving cord blood?
Cord blood is actually about 100mL of blood remaining in the placenta and umbilical cord after the baby is born and the navel is cut.
Cord blood is precious because every child has only one chance to store cord blood at birth, and partly because cord blood contains powerful hematopoietic stem cells.
Why are hematopoietic stem cells powerful? It is because it can renew itself for a long time and differentiate into various mature blood cells, just like "regaining life".
Stem cell transplantation can not only treat a variety of metabolic diseases (leukemia, lymphoma, etc.), blood diseases and immune diseases, but also is used in the field of regenerative medicine.
However, the treatment of diseases through hematopoietic stem cell transplantation needs to be based on the basis of "door to door", otherwise there will be a rejection reaction, which not only cannot play the role of hematopoietic stem cells, but also helps.
Before transplantation, the problem of "matching" must be considered, which is much more difficult than blood transfusion matching.
According to some marketing numbers, save the child's umbilical cord blood, use your own blood when you need it, and don't have to worry about the problem of matching failure!
In this way, it seems that cord blood is super powerful, and it is really worth saving a copy for children!
Children basically do not need cord blood
In fact, cord blood can indeed save lives, but the chance of using it on oneself is quite low! How low is this probability? The data shows that the probability of a child using their own cord blood for the disease does not exceed 1 in 2700. Patients who actually use cord blood to treat diseases almost all of their cord blood comes from public cord blood banks (about 99.9%). Why? First of all, hematopoietic stem cell transplantation is mainly used to treat diseases with hematopoietic dysfunction, and the occurrence of these diseases may be caused by genetic factors, in this case, autologous cord blood stem cells are likely to have the same genetic defects, even if transplantation does not work. In addition, the number of stem cells in cord blood is very limited. As we said earlier, each umbilical cord blood is about 100 mL, and the hematopoietic stem cells in it are theoretically only enough for children weighing less than 30 kg for treatment. For children or adults weighing more than 30 kilograms, it is basically impossible to complete bone marrow reconstruction by relying only on the hematopoietic stem cells contained in a single serving of umbilical cord blood.
So, excluding the problem of genetic inheritance, can the autologously preserved umbilical cord blood be used? Not necessarily! Although the matching of public cord blood banks is very difficult, once the matching is successful, it can be directly used for treatment. The autologous preservation of umbilical cord blood is not necessarily, although there is no need to worry about matching failure, but these umbilical cord blood may lose its therapeutic value due to too long storage time. The American Academy of Pediatrics pointed out that whether cord blood that has been frozen for ten, twenty years or more is still valuable is highly debatable. Therefore, there is not much basis for marketers to say that "self-stored cord blood can save lives".
Instead of storing your own cord blood, you should donate it
Such precious cord blood, is it not directly needed? Of course not! You can choose a better way to save: donate to a public blood bank.
The benefits of this are many. First, there is no cost to donate cord blood to public blood banks. Private cord blood banks are for-profit institutions, and the price of preserving cord blood is not cheap.
Audit expert: Liu Huiyun, deputy chief physician of the Department of Obstetrics, The First Affiliated Hospital of the Third Military Medical University