Hi Beryl,
As far as I understand they use cord blood transplantation for patients who cannot find a suitably HLA matched adult volunteer marrow or peripheral blood donor and who are at increased risk of regimen-related toxicity and transplant related mortality, such as older or heavily treated patients.
They don't seem to have enough cord blood for patients with good donors so they save cord blood for the other patients. Here are several abstracts (a bit old) about cord blood.
http://www.cordbloodforum.org/biblio...ord/index.html
You are eventually right about that grades III-IV acute and chronic GVHD is less common in these patients but I don't think the survival at 3 years - 45% - is better than with other types of cells. It is difficult to tell the differences if they don't compare treatments in a statistical way. Much depends on how ill the patients are before the SCT.
Kind regards
Birgitta-A