Everything You Need To Know About Cord Blood Banking?

Since the time that you’ve broken the news of your pregnancy, it’s not just you, your whole family is extremely happy. After all, you’re about to welcome the most important part of your life after the nine months’ long journey. In the mode of excitement and anxiety, you start planning many things – baby-proofing the house, designing the nursery, purchasing baby toys, the baby gear, the crib, and your maternity clothes to make your baby’s arrival absolutely safe and extremely pleasant.

As you progress with your pregnancy, you might have heard about cord blood banking from many expecting parents, like you. Therefore, this is also the time to decide on cord blood banking not just to protect your baby’s health, but also the health of your family.

However, thinking of cord blood banking, many questions cross your mind:

What is Cord Blood?

During your pregnancy, the umbilical cord, a rope-like structure, that connects you to your baby, is the route to love and care for your baby, while he or she is still snuggled up in your womb. In fact, the baby inside you gets all that he or she needs – the oxygen and nutrients from the placenta via the umbilical cord blood. Once you deliver your baby, the doctor disinfects and punctures the vein to cut and clamp the cord a few inches apart to separate you from your baby.

Earlier, however, this cord and the cord blood were treated as medical waste. Nowadays, research in the medical fraternity has shown that cord blood, which is full of haematopoietic (blood-forming) stem cells, has the capacity to differentiate into various blood cell types like red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets, during a process of transplant, thus treating over 80 life-threatening diseases.  Knowing the power of these cord blood stem cells, many expecting parents as you think about cord blood banking.

How Is the Cord Blood Collected?

Well! Nowadays, immediately after the delivery of your baby, your doctor will close off the cord after clamping it. The cord blood collection takes place when the doctor uses a needle to extract the cord blood and put it inside a sterile bag. Sometimes the doctor might tilt the cord to drain the blood into the bag. Since you get trained experts to perform this activity during the time of childbirth, they perform the whole activity within 15 minutes, and approximately 72% of the blood gets collected, without causing any pain either to you or your baby. Then the cord blood collection bag is sent to the lab for testing, processing, and cryopreservation.

What Options Do You Get to Preserve the Cord Blood?

Once the cord blood is sent to the facility or lab, an automated, functionally closed, and sterile system is used for processing the cord blood. Since isolation is an essential step before cryopreserving the cord blood, such advanced technology is used to recover the highest number of quality stem cells, thus ensuring no manual inaccuracy and improved transplant outcomes. After harvesting the cord blood stem cells, the blood is stored. Some of the best cord blood banks, use the best designed cryogenic tanks with the idea to store the baby’s stem cells for a long period of time. Since the cord blood is nascent, experts believe storing it in the best designed cryogenic tanks would not deteriorate the quality over time.

Having said you will get two options to preserve the cord blood: public and private. 

While in a public cord blood bank, you have the option of donating your baby’s cord blood and might have to lose the exclusive right upon your baby’s cord blood, storing your baby’s stem cells would help you reap the benefits like finding a near-perfect match with siblings and other close family members, readily available whenever there might be a need, lesser chance of complication after transplantation and can be preserved for over two decades (between 21 to 75 years of a baby’s life).

However, while public cord blood banks are free, storing your baby’s cord blood privately would need an initial fee and an annual fee. Above all, if choose Cordlife India as a private cord blood bank, make sure that you choose a bank that has AABB accreditation – the golden standards.

When Would You Decide to Bank Your Baby’s Cord Blood?

Understanding the entire journey from cord blood collection to cryopreservation and retrieval, take the decision of cord blood banking  a month or two before your delivery.