Word: cords
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There were risks, however. The new cells take longer to establish, exposing the child to infection. Also, as Stiehm explains, if the transplant doesn't work, "you don't have a second chance," because you're unlikely to find matching cord blood...
...require precise genetic matches that can take months to find and often fail. "The doctors basically told us [transplants] would either kill them or save them," says Theresa. So they chose an experimental alternative: transfusing the youngsters with a type of stem cell harvested from a newborn's umbilical cord and placenta. Unlike their more controversial cousins, embryonic stem cells, which are harvested from aborted fetuses and can develop into almost any cell, cord blood cells are used to rebuild blood and immune systems--exactly what the LaRue boys needed. In effect, says UCLA's Dr. E. Richard Stiehm...
...February 1997 it was four-year-old brother Garrett's turn. His ordeal was mercifully briefer. After four months, including 10 days of chemo, Garrett was out of the hospital--with a temporarily bald pate but a spanking-new immune system. Heartened, the UCLA doctors did a cord transplant on a third boy, Billy Bodine, 11, to correct a similarly inherited immune deficiency called X-linked hyper-immunoglobin M syndrome...
Last week, after two years of post-transplant observation, the UCLA doctors felt confident enough to pronounce all three boys cured. "They're as healthy as anyone," says Stiehm, who sees them as proof that cord blood can save many more young lives. --By Frederic Golden. Reported by Dan Cray/Los Angeles
Opioid painkillers, which include morphine and heroin as well as prescription products like Percocet, Percodan and Vicodin, are so dangerous because they are so seductive. They work by throwing up roadblocks all along the pain pathway from the nerve endings in the skin to the spinal cord to the brain. In the brain these drugs open the floodgates for the chemical dopamine, which triggers sensations of well-being. Dopamine rewires the brain to become accustomed to those benign feelings. When an addicted person stops taking the drug, the body craves the dopamine again...