An online friend posted a really interesting and encouraging story about a little boy with CP whose parents had banked his cord blood. Later after he was diagnosed, they were able to infuse the stem cells from the cord blood into his body via IV. After the infusion he made remarkable improvements in a very short period of time and continues to improve. He is not the only child who has had success with this, just the most recent in the media. Here is a story and video.
Anyway, this is being done at Duke University by a doctor named Joanne Kurtzberg. While we decided against banking Jackson's cord blood because of the high cost and the very slim likelihood that we would ever need it, we have decided that we are going to bank the cord blood of Jackson's sibling. While all the examples I have seen have used the child's own cord blood for an infusion, it is my hope that soon we will be able to use a sibling's cord blood for the same thing with similar results.
If you are not involved in a clinical trial, it is very expensive to do a cord blood infusion (about $12,000 from what I have seen) and of course insurance will not pay. Still, we will have the money from the settlement and hopefully one day in the not so distant future, we will have the chance to do this with Jackson.
