What Parents Should Know About Cord Blood Banking

Millions of parents have paid to bank blood from their infants’ umbilical cords. But storage companies have misled them about the cells’ promise.

Is cord blood banking a worthwhile investment in your child’s future?

The birth of a baby comes with an overwhelming number of decisions, one of which is whether to bank the newborn’s cord blood cells.
Whether cord blood banking is worth it for a family hinges on various factors, including the present health of their child, the existence of twins in the family and many other individual considerations.

Cord blood banking involves the collection and storage of stem cells derived from the blood of a newborn’s umbilical cord immediately after birth. The reason is its potential life-saving abilities, as the hematopoietic stem cells found in cord blood have the unique ability to differentiate into various types of blood cells.

Preserving the cord blood cells provides an option for future therapeutic use in treating a range of diseases for the child or siblings. These stem cells are less likely to face rejection during transplant due to their immature nature. This widens the blood cells’ applicability in medical procedures for the donor or family members.

Investigation Accuses Umbilical Cord Blood Banks Of Misleading Clients

Millions of pregnant women get the pitch through their OB-GYN: Put a bit of your newborn’s umbilical cord on ice, as a biological insurance policy. If your child one day faces cancer, diabetes or even autism, the precious stem cells in the cord blood could become a tailor-made cure. Many families are happy to pay for the assurance of a healthy future. … But the leading banks have consistently misled customers and doctors about the technology’s promise, an investigation by The New York Times found. (Kliff and Ghorayshi, 7/15)

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Fine, White Hairs On Your Nose? Could Indicate Cancer, Doctor Warns
A recent social media video highlights an unusual but potentially critical cancer indicator that often goes unnoticed — the sudden growth of fine, white hair on typically hairless areas of the body. Dr. Scott Walter, a board-certified dermatologist, recently highlighted this issue in a TikTok post. This condition is known as acquired hypertrichosis lanuginosa and affects fewer than 1,000 people in the United States, according to the Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center. (Newmark, 7/15)

The New York Times: How Sleep Affects Your Risk Of Dementia

Getting too little sleep later in life is associated with an increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease. But paradoxically, so is getting too much sleep. While scientists are confident that a connection between sleep and dementia exists, the nature of that connection is complicated. It could be that poor sleep triggers changes in the brain that cause dementia. Or people’s sleep might be disrupted because of an underlying health issue that also affects brain health. And changes in sleep patterns can be an early sign of dementia itself. (Smith, 7/15)

Newsweek: Massage Treatment Debunked By Scientists

While getting a massage might feel great, scientists have found that there isn’t strong evidence that they actually help with pain. Analyzing the results of more than 100 studies, researchers discovered that only a few of the studies found that massages help reduce pain, according to a new paper in the journal JAMA Network Open. (Thomson, 7/15)

AP: Celebrities Are Getting $2,000 MRI Scans To Learn About Their Health. Should You?
What if there was a way to peer into your body and spot early signs of cancer and other life-threatening ailments before they became serious? … These whole-body MRI scans aren’t cheap. Startup companies like Prenuvo charge between $1,000 to $2,500 for various scanning options, none of which are currently covered by insurance. Proponents say consumer-driven medical scans are the next logical step in preventive medicine. (Perrone, 7/15)

In 2019, Praveen Gudipati and Ramya Raj, a couple based in Houston, Texas, gave birth to their first child, Kiaan. Before he was born, they made an important decision: what to do with the blood from his umbilical cord. It could either be discarded, donated, or stored privately for Kiaan’s own future use if he needed it. For Gudipati, an IT professional, and Raj, an artist, the answer was clear.
“We decided to donate to a public non-profit bank, which meant that anyone who could benefit from the cord blood could access it for free,” Gudipati says. His wife interviewed several cord blood banks before settling on Cord for Life Foundation.

What makes cord blood so precious is that it contains blood stem cells – cells that can grow into any kind of blood cell in the human body, including the red blood cells that carry oxygen or white blood cells that form part of the immune system. Blood stem cells have been used to treat leukaemia and other blood diseases. They are not only found in cord blood, but are also in bone marrow, which is why many treatments for blood diseases require surgical bone marrow transplants. In cases where a patient’s own bone marrow is also affected by the disease, they need to be matched to a donor for the transplant – and there is still a high risk of rejection in these procedures, meaning the patient’s body may not accept the donated cells.

Cord blood transplantation, on the other hand, is comparatively simpler – more akin to an ordinary infusion of blood. The frozen cord blood is thawed, the stem cells are tested for viability and then infused intravenously. If your parents stored your cord blood privately when you were born, you could in theory have access to a supply of your own blood stem cells later in life (although it is worth noting that the longest cord blood stem cells have been stored with the cells still found to be viable is 20 years). If they chose a public bank, it could also be donated to others.

“Thousands of life-saving transplants are done every year using blood stem cells,” says Leonard Zon, professor of pediatric medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Stem Cell Programme, Children’s Hospital, Boston.

In terms of rejection risk, contamination and infection, cord blood cells have an advantage, says Zon. They don’t need the surgery associated with a transplant, and they can self-renew. “A single blood stem cell could replicate and replace six pints [3.4 litres] of your blood,” he says. “Currently medical experts are using cord blood to treat blood diseases – to either build up red blood cells in conditions such as sickle cell anemia or to treat leukemia,” he adds, noting that they can also be used to treat rare inherited genetic disorders.

Around the world, a small but growing number of parents are concluding that banking their baby’s cord blood is the best way of ensuring future access to this potentially life-saving resource – though the procedure’s popularity varies a lot between countries. According to Cell Trials Data, a provider of data on clinical trials of advances cell therapy, cord blood banking rates are highest in the US, at 3% of births each year. In India, that number hovers around 0.4% of births, while in the UK just 0.3% of births bank cord blood each year and in France that number is as low as 0.08%. The global cord blood banking market was valued at $1.3bn (£1.03bn) in 2020, and is expected to grow to $4.5bn (£3.6bn) in the next decade.

For parents who can afford to bank their baby’s blood privately, the decision may feel easy. After all, there is no risk in storing it, and they would then have direct access to perfectly matched blood. However, some argue that as a health resource, cord blood is at its most powerful when used as a public good, not a private one.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, even though there are over six times as many units of cord blood stored in private banks worldwide compared to public banks, the latter have released about 30 times more units for therapeutic use.

Zon points out that blood stem cells are an immensely valuable resource, but that doesn’t mean that private storage is the only option for accessing them. “I always tell parents that if they can afford it, to privately bank their cord blood. Otherwise, it’s just not required,” says Zon. As long as public banks keep growing, and donations get more diverse, it is possible to find a match if ever you need it, he says. He also urges parents to be realistic in their expectations of private banks, and choose theirs carefully. “In any procedure where you’re storing a tissue, there’s a chance of it being infected. So, the competence (of the healthcare worker) who’s storing the cord blood is important.”
Parents also need to be aware that cord blood likely has a finite shelf-life, where it can’t be stored indefinitely, Zon says.