Workplace and personal injuries can have a devastating impact on quality of life and a person’s ability to continue working and performing home and child care tasks.
Although some injuries heal in due course after treatment, some injuries become chronic or trigger pain syndromes that interfere with or make it impossible to perform work tasks and activities of daily living. Platelet rich plasma treatments may be able to help.
Platelet Rich Plasma
Platelet rich plasma (PRP) has been used for several decades in medicine. It was initially used during surgical procedures to speed healing, and then doctors realized it could also help heal an assortment of other conditions, including chronic injuries and pain syndromes. PRP is prepared from the patient’s own blood in a quick, in-office procedure. A normal blood sample is obtained and then the blood is centrifuged to remove the white and red blood cells and to concentrate the platelets in the remaining liquid (the plasma). Platelets are constantly being formed in the bone marrow; they are not cells but are basically sacs filled with coagulation factors, growth factors, and cytokines. Normally, when an acute injury occurs, the platelets rupture and release their contents, which rapidly induce blood clotting. The growth factors induce the injured tissues to heal, and the cytokines attract immune cells to fight infection and stem cells to help repair the injured tissues.
Chronic Injuries
Although acute injuries are usually quite good at repairing themselves in part because of the action of platelets, chronic injuries, such as workplace induced repetitive motion injuries, generally do not fare as well; such injuries do not induce platelets to rupture and release their cocktail of healing factors. However, doctors have realized that preparing PRP and injecting it into the sites of chronic injuries and pain syndromes can jump-start the healing process. PRP first started receiving attention after professional athletes began using it to treat their chronic injuries, but it works just as well to treat work place and personal injuries that have not healed properly in response to rest, ice, and routine medical treatments.
The Procedure
A PRP treatment is fairly straightforward: a blood sample is obtained, usually from a vein in the arm, and then the patient waits while the PRP is prepared in the office. Then, the PRP is carefully injected into the site of the injury. Depending on the type of injury, one or several injections may be required. Since the PRP is derived from the patient’s own blood, there are basically no risks. Results are not immediately apparent because PRP works by inducing the body to heal itself, which takes time. Typically, patients will need to receive a course of treatment with repeated injections; the number of injections and the time elapsed between the injections depends on the injury and the individual patient’s response. In general, results usually start to become apparent several weeks after the first treatment and then continue to improve for several months after that.