Umbilical Cord Blood May Aid Recovery From Brain Damage

Tests on rats showed improvement in neurological and motor functions

WEDNESDAY, June 19, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Human umbilical cord blood may one day help victims of brain injuries, says a new study in the journal Cell Transplantation.

Researchers at Henry Ford Health Sciences Center in Detroit and the University of South Florida in Tampa injected cells from human umbilical cord blood into brain-injured rats, improving the rats' neurological and motor functions.

The researchers say the cord blood seems to help "promote the brain's self-generated repair of damaged tissue." They found similar results in an earlier study in which they used cord blood to treat stroke in rats.

In the new study, the researchers injected umbilical cord blood into the tail veins of rats 24 hours after the animals had suffered traumatic brain injury.

At 14 and 28 days after receiving the injections, the rats had greater improvement in movement, balance and reflex responses than brain-injured rats who received a placebo, the study says.

More information

To learn more about the new uses of cord blood, visit the UCLA Umbilical Cord Blood Bank.

Patients who need a bone-marrow transplant but can't find an appropriate donor can now receive cord blood, which is usually thrown away, to substitute for marrow, UCLA researchers say.

UCLA is one of the sites selected by the National Institutes of Health to build a national cord blood bank system.

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