Cord Blood Can Help Fight Krabbe’s Disease
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
Transplanting umbilical cord blood to seemingly healthy infants before they develop symptoms of Krabbe’s disease can dramatically prolong their lives, researchers reported this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.
About one in 100,000 newborns has Krabbe’s disease, an inherited condition that destroys the insulation surrounding nerve cells and typically kills a child by age 2.
All 11 children treated before symptoms developed survived, but only six of 14 whose symptoms had already appeared did so, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
