Cancer and Healthy

The chance of developing a child with leukemia is only about 1 in 2000 with more or less 400 to 450 new cases per year in the United Kingdom alone.

Cure rates approaching seventy-five percent can be achieved in combination with chemotherapy, but this figure hide success rates ranging from ten to ninety percent of the different biological subtypes of the disease.

Today, new insights into the underlying molecular biology of leukemia have changed our understanding of the disease. Not only is there a prospect of better treatment and the introduction of the new biologically based therapies, but as the causes of the disease are unraveled, the possibility of prevention can not just wishful thinking.

It is approved for a very long time that leukemia in children is not a homogeneous disease. The main morphological division in acute lymphatic leukemia system is complemented by the designation of a series of subgroups based on gene expression, cell antigens that definition or differentiation status and chromosomal and molecular abnormalities.

There is now tremendous confirmation that chromosome translocation is often the first event in infant twins with acute lymphocyte leukemia, the same breaks in the ML-Gen.

Further evidence that childhood leukemia can originate before birth comes from scrutiny of neonatal blood spots or Guthrie cards. PR tests for specific gene fusion, designed for each patient, can detect only 1 in 20 leukemic cells in the blood spot. The presence of the merger the same sequence of genes in a neonatal blood spot in the patient's leukemic cells at diagnosis provides unequivocal evidence that leukemia is initiated prenatally, probably by the creation of the fusion gene itself.

If this form of leukemia progress is actually correct, this means that for every child diagnosed with acute lymphocyte leukemia, there must be at least twenty healthy children who have a trans-chromosome location, a functional fusion gene leukemia, and a disguised per-leukemia clone generated in wombs.

Cord blood bank can help cure this disease through the stem cells in cord blood. The cord blood is the blood that remains in the umbilical cord and placenta after a baby is born and can be used because it is so rich in stem cells.

The stem cells found in cord blood restore the function of the patient's immune system and blood production systems, and is a powerful alternative to the use of bone marrow.