Child Leukemia and Stem Cells

The possibility of a kid getting leukemia is something like around one in two thousands with roughly four hundred new cases appearing every year in the United Kingdom.
The cure rate for that disease varies a lot and depends on many different things.

The latest researches and studies around this disease have helped us change our understanding of the disease which gives us a greater possibility to find treatments and develop therapies to stop it or prevent the development of leukemia.

The stem cells present in the cord blood, if use can help cure this disease, but it has to be the stem cells of the person sick to guarantee a good recovery.
The stem cells found in cord blood will help restore the function of the patient's immune and blood producing systems, which is a powerful alternative to using bone marrow.
In order to have those stem cells ready to use in case one of your kid get this disease, it is a good idea to use stem cells bank or cord blood banks that will do stem cells or cord blood collection and then cord blood storage. Since we never know what the future is made of, storing your baby's stem cells or cord blood at birth could save their lives in the future. The use of stem cells to cure some diseases is only at its beginning and it is almost sure that stem cells will help cure a lot more diseases in the future.

Going back to leukemia itself, a lot of studies and researches have been carried out over the years to try to find cures and understand better the disease.
There is at the present enormous indications that chromosome translocation is very frequently the first occurrence in infant twins with a severe lymphoblastic leukemia.
More evidence that childhood leukemia can originate before birth comes from the inspection of neonatal blood spots. Some tests carried out for specific fusion genes, can detect as few as one in twenty leukemic cells in a blood spot. The existence of the same fusion gene chain in a neonatal blood spot as is in a patient's leukemic cells at diagnosis provides unmistakable evidence that leukemia has been initiated prenatally, and probably by the development of the fusion gene itself.

The more time passes, the more scientists realize that stem cells can be very useful and will certainly help us a lot in the battle against some diseases. That is also why a lot of stem cells bank and cord blood banks have been created over the past years.