Footballers Kick Off Cell Freezing

Over the weekend, a story, or rather a part of a story, from 7 Days, Dubai caught my eye. The main part of the article covers general matters related to storing umbilical stem cells and their potential benefits and uses. However, the paragraph that caught my eye related to use for the cells that I hadn't previously considered.

Stem Cells as an 'insurance policy’. This notion has caught the eye of numerous professional footballers, as it could prove useful in saving their football careers if they were ever to be seriously injured. Eight Premiership (England's top soccer league) players in the past year are said to have frozen the stem cells taken from the umbilical cord blood of their newborn as a possible future cure for any cartilage or ligament problems they may receive.

As stem cell research raises the possibility that doctors will be able to grow tissue that exactly matches a person’s own, thereby offering opportunities to replace bad cells and reduce the risk of rejection in the event of a transplant. As a footballer, being prone to injury can mean the end of your career, so having your stem cells - a repair kit if you like - on hand could make sense.