My wife and I are expecting a baby this May. I only recently learned about this, but apparently there is an option to save the cord blood and tissue during the delivery. This seems potentially very useful, so I'm wondering if anyone has done research into this or has found trustworthy, informative resources on this topic.
My current understanding is that this tissue has a lot of stem cells. And the stem cells are useful for all sorts of medical procedures, and are even more likely to be used in the future. But currently we don't have an easy (or cheap?) way to get them.
Broad questions I have:
- How valuable are the stem cells right now and how valuable are they expected to be in the future?
- How hard is it to get stem cells for yourself / your child right now vs in the future?
- Will the collected stem cells be only useful for the baby or the mother too?
- Can we reasonably expect the cryo companies to last long enough and not go under?
- Have you had experience donating it?
- Have you had experience storing it?
There are a lot of great points here. A couple more to consider:
With private banking, while you do pay the fees for storage, your baby's chances for a match to itself are 100%, and between 25%-75% for baby's immediate biological family ( mom, dad, sibling). And, you don't have the large fees associated with pulling out a "withdraw" as you do with public banking because you are already paying the small annual fee for storage.
People often think about the big diseases down the road, but don't forget about the more common things that can happen during the birthing process such as lack of oxygen that causes issues which are being resolved currently using baby's own stem cells.