During the past several years, much has been written about a preparation called platelet-rich plasma (PRP) and its potential effectiveness in the treatment of injuries.

Many famous athletes — Tiger Woods, tennis star Rafael Nadal, and several others — have received PRP for various problems, such as sprained knees and chronic tendon injuries. These types of conditions have typically been treated with medications, physical therapy, or even surgery. Some athletes have credited PRP with their being able to return more quickly to competition.

Platelet-rich plasma, or PRP, is a substance that’s thought to promote healing when injected. Plasma is a component of your blood that contains special “factors,” or proteins, that help your blood to clot. It also contains proteins that support cell growth. Researchers have produced PRP by isolating plasma from blood and concentrating it.

The idea is that injecting PRP into damaged tissues will stimulate your body to grow new, healthy cells and promote healing. Because the tissue growth factors are more concentrated in the prepared growth injections, the body’s tissues may heal faster.

How Does PRP Work?

Although it is not exactly clear how PRP works, laboratory studies have shown that the increased concentration of growth factors in PRP can potentially speed up the healing process.

To speed healing, the injury site is treated with the PRP preparation. This can be done in one of two ways:

• PRP can be carefully injected into the injured area. 

For example, in Achilles tendonitis, a condition commonly seen in runners and tennis players, the heel cord can become swollen, inflamed, and painful. A mixture of PRP and local anesthetic can be injected directly into this inflamed tissue. Afterwards, the pain at the area of injection may actually increase for the first week or two, and it may be several weeks before the patient feels a beneficial effect.

• PRP may also be used to improve healing after surgery for some injuries. 

For example, an athlete with a completely torn heel cord may require surgery to repair the tendon. Healing of the torn tendon can possibly be improved by treating the injured area with PRP during surgery. This is done by preparing the PRP in a special way that allows it to actually be stitched into torn tissues.

What are the purposes of PRP injections?

Researchers are trying out PRP injections across a number of applications. Examples of these include:

Hair loss: 

We are injecting PRP into the scalp to promote hair growth and prevent hair loss. We have found that PRP injections are effective in treating androgenic alopecia, which is also known as male pattern baldness.

Tendon injuries:

Tendons are tough, thick bands of tissue that connect muscle to bone. They are usually slow to heal after injury. We are using PRP injections to treat chronic tendon problems, such as tennis elbow, Achilles tendonitis at the ankle, and jumper’s knee, or pain in the patellar tendon in the knee.

Acute injuries:

We are using PRP injections to treat acute sports injuries, such as pulled hamstring muscles or knee sprains with great success.

Postsurgical repair:

Sometimes doctors use PRP injections after surgery to repair a torn tendon (such as a rotator cuff tendon in the shoulder) or ligaments (such as the anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL). Healing is accelerated and recovery is much faster.

Osteoarthritis:

Doctors have injected PRP into the knees of people with osteoarthritis. A 2015 study found that PRP injections were more effective than hyaluronic acid injections (a traditional therapy) for treating osteoarthritis. We are also using PRP therapy to treat osteoarthritis knee, but we are using it as a combination therapy.

Conclusion

Treatment with PRP could hold promise, however, current research studies to back up the claims in the media are lacking. Although PRP does appear to be effective in the treatment of chronic tendon injuries about the elbow, the medical community needs more scientific evidence before it can determine whether PRP therapy is truly effective in other conditions.

Even though the success of PRP therapy is still questionable, the risks associated with it are minimal: There may be increased pain at the injection site, but the incidence of other problems — infection, tissue damage, nerve injuries — appears to be no different from that associated with cortisone injections.