Umbilical cord blood can help metabolic disorders
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Umbilical cord blood transplants, even from
unrelated donors, can help save the lives of babies born with certain
inherited metabolic disorders, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.
Usually, bone marrow transplants are the only option for such
infants, who can die from organ failure and early death. Bone marrow
transplants can be difficult to get and donors are rare.
Umbilical cord blood, however, can be donated with every birth and
also contains immature cells known as stem cells that can restore
missing or damaged cells in a patient.
Stem cells are the body's master cells and there are several kinds.
Stem cells from the bone marrow or cord blood are partly
differentiated, or transformed, and can be used to restore the immune
systems of patients undergoing cancer treatment, for example.
Dr. Vinod Prasad and colleagues at Duke University in North Carolina
studied 159 children with inherited metabolic disorders who received
transplants of cord blood from unrelated newborns at Duke between
1995 and 2007.
"We saw that there were advantages to the unrelated cord blood
transplant," Prasad said in a statement.
"For instance, cord blood is more readily available than bone marrow
and there was a decreased risk of complications, including a lower
incidence of serious and potentially fatal graft-versus-
which occurs when donor cells perceive a recipient's tissues and
organs as foreign."
Speaking to an American Society of Hematology meeting in Atlanta,
Prasad said more than 88 percent of patients who got cord blood
transplants before they began to show too many symptoms of illness
lived for at least a year.
"One reason for this could be the cord blood cells are
immunologically more naive than the blood-forming stem cells derived
from bone marrow and therefore they may be more adaptable and less
reactive once they get into the patient's body," he said.
One metabolic disease Prasad's team treated is Krabbe disease, also
known as Krabbe leukodystrophy, which affects the nervous system.
Another is Hurler disease, which affects the heart, liver and brain.
"These disorders are rare when taken individually -- some of them
occur in only one in a million births -- but if you put them together
they have a sizable incidence, maybe 1 in 10,000 births," Prasad said.
(Reporting by Maggie Fox, editing by Will Dunham and Sandra Maler)
http://www.sciam.
«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
StemCells subscribers may also be interested in these sites:
Children's Neurobiological Solutions
http://www.CNSfoundation.org/
Cord Blood Registry
http://www.CordBlood.com/at.cgi?a=150123
The CNS Healing Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CNS_Healing
____________________________________________
«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Earn your degree in as few as 2 years - Advance your career with an AS, BS, MS degree - College-Finder.net.
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch format to Traditional
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe
__,_._,___
No comments:
Post a Comment