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By Liz Townsend

More parents are choosing to save their newborns' umbilical cord blood after studies have shown that it is an invaluable source of stem cells that could treat a growing number of diseases. The latest success story comes from Sacramento, California, where two-year-old Dallas Hextell has triumphed over cerebral palsy with the help of a stem cell transplant.

Cerebral palsy refers to neurological disorders that "permanently affect body movement and muscle coordination but don't worsen over time," according to the web site of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Soon after Dallas was born in 2006, his parents, Cynthia and Derek Hextell, noticed that he was having severe physical problems. "He would cry for three hours straight like he was in pain," Mrs. Hextell said on the Today show. "He couldn't really focus on things. When he started eating baby food, he had trouble controlling his tongue."

Doctors diagnosed cerebral palsy, and the Hextells began to scour the Internet for more information and for hope. They discovered that Duke University in North Carolina was conducting a study that uses a child's own umbilical cord blood stem cells to treat cerebral palsy and other forms of brain damage, according to East Bay Express.

The Hextells had decided just weeks before Dallas's birth to spend $2,000 to store his umbilical cord blood. "I had never even heard of cord blood, but I'm a huge researcher," Mrs. Hextell told East Bay Express. She gathered brochures for different cord blood banks, and decided to use a California-based company called Cord Blood Registry.

"It's the same as medical insurance or life insurance--you pay for it but most likely you'll never use it," she added. "I would rather have spent the money and never used it, than have not spent the money and regretted that I didn't get it."

They brought Dallas across the country to Duke in July 2007. He received a transfusion of stem cells that had been obtained from the stored cord blood. Since the cells came from Dallas, without harming him at all, there is no threat of immune system rejection.

"He had 191 million [stem cells] put back into him during the transfusion," Derek Hextell told Today, "and then there's 15 million left that they keep aside in case in the future they are ever able to regenerate."

Although the monetary cost of the procedure was large--about $12,000--the Hextells were soon able to see that it was worth every penny. "[T]here was such a drastic change within five days of the procedure taking place," Mr. Hextell said on Today. "It had to be [the result of the stem cell transfusion], because he wasn't reaching the milestones that he's reaching now. He was falling further and further behind. And once we had the procedure done, he started to get closer and closer to the milestones he was supposed to be reaching."

Five days after the transfusion, Dallas said his first word, "mama," East Bay Express reported. He continued to show more signs of awareness and motor skills that had been missing before the treatment. "His muscle strength has improved greatly and he seems more alert and aware of what is going on around him," Mrs. Hextell told East Bay Express. "He also began to laugh at about a week after the infusion. He never laughed before; he would just kind of screech."

"He had a lot of sensory issues and would not use his hands to do things, but instead would take your hands and guide them to do what he wanted," Mrs. Hextell continued. "Since the procedure he has began to clap his hands and wave, which he did none of before."

The prognosis for Derek is very good, since because cerebral palsy is not a progressive disease, once it is treated there is no reason to expect it will come back. Doctors "said by the age of seven, that there may be no signs of cerebral palsy at all," Mr. Hextell said on Today. "So he's on his way, as far as we're concerned."

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