Cord Blood Practice Guidelines
Guidance from patient and cord blood unit selection through post-HCT care
Cord blood as a graft source has many advantages, but it also has unique considerations. The Cord Blood Practice Guidelines provide consistent recommendations to support clinicians from the initial patient and cord blood unit selection through infusion and post-transplant care.
The Cord Blood Practice Guidelines consist of six open-access articles in the Transplantation and Cellular Therapy journal. Easy-to-navigate Cord Blood Practice guidelines are also available at your fingertips online or via ASTCT’s mobile app on the Apple app store or Google play.
The guidelines are a collaborative effort between the NMDP®, the ASTCT Committee on Practice Guidelines (CoPG) and the ASTCT Cord Blood Special Interest Group (SIG).
Access the cord blood practice guidelines full journal articles
The Guidelines for Cord Blood Unit Selection include evidence-based guidelines for unit selection and experience-based recommendations for situations where evidence is lacking. Simplify the search and selection process with a step-by-step unit selection guide and answers to frequently asked questions.
Cord blood unit thaw and infusion
The Guidelines for Cord Blood Unit Thaw and Infusion outline accepted transplant center thaw procedures, post-thaw graft evaluation, patient care during infusion, and suggestions for managing adverse infusion reactions.
The Guidelines for Adult Patient Selection and Conditioning Regimens outline patient and disease characteristics that make cord blood transplant a good or poor choice as well as outcomes in commonly used conditioning regimens. The guidelines include regimen intensity recommendations based on disease, organ function, patient performance status and patient age.
Infection prophylaxis, monitoring and therapy in cord blood transplantation
Written by cord blood transplant and infectious disease experts, the Guidelines for Infection Prophylaxis, Monitoring and Therapy outline evidence-based recommendations for preventing and treating infections in adult patients undergoing cord blood transplant. The guidelines include tables that summarize recommendations for antimicrobial prophylaxis and viral monitoring recommendations using quantitative PCR.
Prevention and management of graft-versus-host disease (gvhd) after cord blood transplantation
The Guidelines for the Prevention and Management of GVHD outline recommendations for both acute GVHD and chronic GVHD. Topics include risk factors for acute or chronic GVHD, how GVHD prophylaxis and management after cord blood transplant differ from adult donor transplant, how GVHD is treated after cord blood transplant, and more.
Transplantation for pediatric patients—unique considerations
The Guidelines for Pediatric Unrelated Cord Blood Transplantation provide evidence-based and experienced-guidelines for cord blood transplant in pediatric patients. The guidelines cover unique considerations for pediatric patients including considerations for infectious disease management, cord blood unit selection and infusion, conditioning regimen selection, and GVHD management.