Knowledge and attitudes among pregnant women and maternity staff about umbilical cord blood banking

Dear Sir, Umbilical cord blood (UCB) is a recognised and frequently used source of stem cells for allogeneic hematopoietic transplantation, not only for leukemias and lymphomas but also for bone marrow failure syndromes, haemoglobinopathies, immunodeficiencies and inborn errors of metabolism (Chen et al., 2013). Numerous studies have found the outcome after UCB transplantation to be as good as, or even better, than transplantation with stem cells from matched unrelated donors or siblings (Hwang et al., 2007), with similar leukaemia-free survival and leukaemia relapse (Chen et al., 2013), and lower incidence and severity of acute and chronic graft-versus-host disease (Rodrigues et al., 2014). However, UCB transplantation is more expensive than matched unrelated donor or sibling transplantation, because health care systems are obliged to compensate the cost of building up and managing UCB stem cell banks. UCB samples are collected from the remaining placental and UCB immediately after delivery and stored into either a public or private UCB bank. Despite substantial technical and scientific improvements in UCB banking and transplantation, the method has not yet reached its full potential to follow the growing demand for stem cells. This is partially caused by relatively small number of UCB samples fulfilling the high-quality standards required for storage in the Bone Marrow Donors Worldwide, mostly due to insufficient amount or quality of stem cells obtained from the umbilical cord. This can be improved, at least in part, by good training of staff assigned to collect UCB immediately after delivery. However, insufficient awareness of expectant parents about UCB banking in general (Palten & Dudenhausen, 2010) as well as insufficient knowledge regarding its usefulness may be another important cause of reluctance for donating UCB due to lack of motivation. In order to determine the awareness, level of knowledge, attitudes and information sources of pregnant women and hospital maternity staff about UCB banking and to explore a possible link concerning the knowledge about UCB banking between maternity staff members directly involved in perinatal care and pregnant women to whom they provide it, we conducted a prospective study in two university hospitals in Zagreb, Croatia, between November 2014 and April 2015. The study was granted approval by the Ethics Committees of both hospitals. Two simple anonymous questionnaires were used for pregnant women