Pregnancy

As a bit of backup insurance, Helena and Greg Housser* of Milton, Ont., decided to deposit their babies’ umbilical cord blood into a blood bank. As with any insurance, they didn’t expect they’d ever need to draw on it. But when their eldest child, Sam, was only four, he developed acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a fast-growing cancer of the white blood cells and one of the most common childhood cancers. The standard treatment: two to three years of intensive chemotherapy. But the Houssers had another option: using the cord blood they’d banked. They couldn’t use Sam’s own sample, which contained the rare genetic mutation that caused his disease. But his three-year-old brother’s was a good-enough match, and his baby sister’s a close second. Sam underwent a procedure that killed all his own white blood cells. He was then injected with his brother’s cord blood and within a year, he had a new, fully functioning blood system.

Today, at almost nine, Sam is a tall, lanky, sports-loving kid with long hockey hair and no sign of the disease. And Helena, a lawyer, and Greg, a police officer, are exceedingly grateful they happened to see a flyer about cord blood in their obstetrician’s office when Helena was first pregnant.

It does seem like an obvious choice. What parent or parent-to-be wouldn’t want to do everything possible to ensure the healthiest future for their child? Yet things are not that simple with cord blood banking. “It’s viewed as insurance and it’s certainly promoted as such,” says Anthony Armson, head of obstetrics and gynaecology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, a physician with IWK Health Centre and lead author of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada’s guidelines on cord blood banking. “But there’s still a lot of uncertainty in this field, and I’m not sure parents are completely informed of the limitations.”

*Names changed by request.

Originally published in Today's Parent, August 2009