Rebecca Judd stores daughter’s umbilical cord
New mum Rebecca Judd has joined the growing ranks of Australian mothers choosing to store their newborn’s umbilical cord blood and tissue at the birth - to help provide an increased level of future health security for her child and family.
With the arrival of her daughter Billie Kate, weighing 3.3 kgs, Rebecca chose to collect and store not only her newborn’s cord blood, but also a section of the umbilical cord (cord tissue) with Cell Care.
"We view it as an important future health insurance step"
Umbilical cord tissue contains specific stem cells – known as mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). These stem cells are the building blocks of many of the support tissues within the body including bone, cartilage and muscle. As with cord blood – these stem cells collected at birth have a greater potential for use than stem cells collected in later life.
We only chose cord blood storage with our first child Oscar. Now that storing umbilical cord tissue is available in Australia, it made a lot of sense to store both the cord tissue and blood with our new daughter, Billie. Having a perfect stem cell match stored for Billie and cells which may also be a potential match for our family - was very important to us,” comments Rebecca.
Of course, you obviously hope to never be in a position to have to use it,” she adds. “But ensuring we stored this important cord tissue and cord blood – when you have only one opportunity at birth – made sense. You never know what the future holds and with such rapid advances in stem cell research each year. We view it as an important future health insurance step."
Over 200 clinical investigations are underway worldwide into stem cells gathered from cord blood and cord tissue.
