What is it about?
Is it worth to store a baby's umbilical cord blood at birth for his or her own future use? In the rare instance when a child is seriously ill from bone marrow failure, the cord blood banked at the time of birth can be used for transplant. However, the cellular content must be rich enough for successful treatment.
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Why is it important?
Severe aplastic anemia is a rare blood disease in childhood. It occurs when the bone marrow, the organ that manufactures blood cells, stops working. Without effective treatment, the condition is lethal. Bone marrow or blood stem cell transplantation is the treatment of choice. The blood stem cell often comes from a healthy donor. But if a patient has his/her own umbilical cord blood collected and banked at the time of birth, this can be a potential source of blood stem cell for the transplant. When umbilical cord blood products from others are used (allogeneic use), there are commonly agreed criteria in terms of cellular content that must be met to increase the chance of successful transplant. However, similar criteria when using one's own umbilical cord blood (autologous use) do not exist. Our experience, together with other published cases, indicates strongly that both autologous and allogeneic uses of umbilical cord blood for transplant should follow similar criteria.
Perspectives
Collecting and storing a baby's own umbilical cord blood at birth for private use is controversial. At present, we do not support this practice for the sake of "insurance". As a transplant physician, I do not use a child's own stem cell or cord blood to treat leukemias. Stem cell transplanted from another individual produces far better results than the patient's own cells. From the published medical literature, aplastic anemia is probably the commonest and valid condition in which autologous cord blood transplantation has been done. Yet, only 15 such cases have been reported so far. If a parent wants to store his/her baby's umbilical cord blood as an insurance to treat aplastic anemia later, the chance that this will happen before the child reaches 6 years old is about 1 in 40 000. Why 6 years old? It is because the cord blood is unlikely to meet the child's size after that age.
Dr Anselm C Lee
Hong Kong Sanatorium and Hospital
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Autologous Cord Blood Transplantation for Idiopathic Severe Aplastic Anemia, Journal of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology, August 2025, Wolters Kluwer Health,
DOI: 10.1097/mph.0000000000003106.
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