Cord blood treatment gains clout
Related News: Stem Cells and CancerWilliam Dotson, a 20-year-old Uniontown resident decided that no amount of worrying would change things. He also decided that he would do whatever he could to fight off leukemia again.
He chose the to look into the some of the research regarding cord-blood stem cells....
He was presented these choices.
The options with the best survival rate is a bone marrow transplant from a related, matched donor, usually a sibling. In those cases, the survival rate is between 45 percent and 55 percent. The next best option, with a survival rate of 33 percent, is a bone marrow transplant from a donor who is unrelated, but matches the patient's characteristics.
Cord blood's key advantage over bone marrow is that it is less likely to be rejected by the patient's immune system compared to that of unrelated bone marrow donors.
In children, cord-blood stem cells have been an alternative treatment to bone marrow donations, even when the marrow matches the patient.
However, adults have been seen as a challenge, because they are obviously larger in size and cord blood overall has fewer stem cells than marrow.
Posted on November 25, 2004 08:52 AM