There's a lot of hype about donating umbilical cord blood. Companies play on parental fears to get you to spend money on this service. So what's the real deal?

The blood that remains in the umbilical cord after birth contains a type of stem cells that have the potential to develop into all the different components of blood. Normally, the blood is discarded with the placenta after delivery, wasting this resource. Private companies have sprung up to store umbilical cord blood for possible future use.

Pros:

• Cord blood can be used like a bone marrow transplant, a potentially life-saving treatment for cancers and other diseases. Over time, more uses may be developed.
  
  
• If price is no object, there is no personal downside to cord blood storage.
  
  

Cons:

• Cord blood collection is expensive -- on average, $1,500 up front and $100 per year for storage. Most new parents have many other uses for those dollars.
  
  
• Private companies market donation to families for "biological insurance" for their child. But a child's own cord blood would rarely be useful for that child. It couldn't be used to treat a genetic disease, since it has exactly the same genes, and if the child got leukemia, the doctors would worry that these were the same cells that turned into leukemia in the first place, and would prefer other treatment alternatives.
  
  
• The chance that a family would collect cord blood and then a close relative would happen to need it is miniscule. Very few samples of routinely collected cord blood have been put to use so far. Most of the collected samples that have been used have been from families who knew that another sibling was going to need it, and collected it for that purpose.
  
  
• The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and many physicians do not recommend private cord blood banking except in cases where a family member currently needs a bone marrow transplant or is at high risk for needing one in the future.
  
  

Public cord blood banking

Another option, if your hospital offers it, is public cord blood donation. Similar to blood banking, cord blood is stored and kept available for anyone who needs it. The patient who needs it pays -- a cost usually covered by insurance. The donor is not charged. If the donating family ever needs a cord blood transplant, the unit will be given back at no charge. If it has already been used, another matched unit will be made available. In the US, 150,000 units of donated cord blood would meet the needs of 80-90% of patients. This makes more sense than each family putting their cord blood in their own "cubby."