Born on November 21, 2001, in Coimbatore, she was a normal baby till she fell ill a year-and-a-half later and was diagnosed with thalassemia, needing blood transfusion every month.
On March 17, eight-year-old Thamirabharuni underwent surgery to receive the cord blood stem cell of her younger sibling, Pugazhendi. Thamira, as she is called, was suffering from thalassemia, a disorder that affects red blood corpuscles. A thalassemia patient might require blood transfusion as frequently as once every week, and this disorder can be fatal in children.
Half a year after the successful operation, Thamira is brimming with joy and on the road to full recover. Born on November 21, 2001, in Coimbatore, she was a normal baby till she fell ill a year-and-a-half later and was diagnosed with thalassemia, needing blood transfusion every month.
Later, when her parents, Senthil Kumar, then a carpenter but now a businessman, and Saronjini, a home-maker, visited Chennai for Thamira’s treatment, they were advised to have another child with the hope that the umbilical cord blood stem cell could be used to cure her. “Unfortunately, the foetus was thalassemia positive as both of us are carriers of thalassemia and we terminated the pregnancy,” Sarojini said.
The parents then met Dr Revathi Raj, paediatric haematologist at Apollo Hospitals, who urged them to consider another pregnancy and go in for umbilical cord blood stem cell banking. Sarojini and Senthil agreed.
A pre-natal test proved that this foetus was not affected with thalassemia. “For a year, the extracted cord blood stem cells were preserved,” said Revathi Raj, “The HLA (human leukocyte antigen) test proved that the tissues of both the children matched. The first step was to destroy all the existing bone marrow cells in Thamira which was done by chemotherapy. The donor’s stem cells were then injected into Thamira. No surgery was done.”
S Abhayakumar, vice-chairman of LifeCell, which helped preserve Pugazhendi’s cord blood stem cells in Chennai, said a new-born sibling’s umbilical cord blood provided a better chance of HLA matching as there is a 25% chance for a perfect match and 50% chance for partial match. “A sibling’s cord blood for transplant lowers the chances of donor rejection. Therefore, it is a preferred source for transplantation,” he said.
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