Cord blood can today save the life of someone with leukemia or other diseases that require bone marrow transplants. While other cord blood stem cell therapies m

Cord blood can today save the life of someone with leukemia or other diseases that require bone marrow transplants. While other cord blood stem cell therapies may be speculative, this one is real and already works to save lives. My sister has leukemia and we just found out that some kind person donated cord blood which matches her tissue type...I can't describe how grateful I feel now. Thank you, whoever you are. In my case, for my children, I would certainly make sure the blood is saved. The only question is whether to do private cord blood banking or to donate the blood to the public blood bank. I would find out how rare is my child's human leukocyte antigen (HLA) tissue type as part of making the decision. If it's rare then it becomes much, much more important to bank known compatible blood. One confounding factor: if your child turns out to have a blood disease later in life, it's not clear to me whether there is a risk in using your child's own stem cells. For example we know little about the causes of leukemia, it could be that even the cord blood cells are potentially cancerous. I'd suggest reading up on this and reaching out to researchers in the area on this front, since it's unlikely your OB/GYN would know the most recent results.