Dallas HEXTELL looked like any other healthy toddler when he appeared on the "Today" show on March 11 -- walking, clapping, laughing, waving to his mom.
But just nine months earlier, cerebral palsy had kept Dallas, now 2, from crawling, sitting up or reaching other milestones of child development.
Dallas' parents attribute his remarkable improvement to an experimental treatment using an infusion of his own umbilical-cord blood, saved at the wish of his parents in a private bank at his birth.
But cerebral palsy and stem cell experts warn that no one knows yet just how well the treatment has worked or whether it will work for others with his condition.
"We would love for research like this to put us out of business," said Dr. Dara Richardson-Heron, national medical director for United Cerebral Palsy. But until more research is done, she said, "it's important to be cautiously optimistic."
About one of 278 children in the United States has cerebral palsy, a motor disability caused by brain damage.
The biggest risk factors for the condition are prematurity, an infection of the amniotic fluid and oxygen deprivation during gestation or birth.
Cord blood has been used with great success as an alternative to bone marrow transplantation to treat cancer and blood disorders such as sickle cell anemia. It can also be used to treat a class of rare but fatal inherited metabolic disorders called lysosomal storage diseases.
But evidence that the stem cells that reside in this blood can travel throughout the body and incorporate into organs fuel the hope that their use can someday be expanded to the regeneration of many damaged tissues.
This hope has led to an increasing interest by parents to save their child's cord blood in private, for-profit banks, as Dallas' parents did.
Dallas was treated as part of a clinical trial at Duke University and is one of 12 children with cerebral palsy who has undergone the procedure so far. The trial is based on animal studies in which cord-blood cells injected into rabbits with a cerebral palsy-like condition traveled to the brain and lessened symptoms, in some cases preventing them altogether. The trial will ultimately study 40 children, tracking each child's progress for two years.
