Frequently Asked Questions
What is PRP Therapy?
Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP) therapy is the name given to a treatment done to stimulate healing which involves injection of one's own growth factors into injured areas. The treatment helps to regenerate damaged joints, tendons, ligaments, and bone with precisely directed injections. These injections are a part of a new field of Regenerative medicine and sometimes referred to as "Biosurgery".
What's the difference between PRP and stem cell therapy?
To use a gardening metaphor, if you have a plant that is injured and not doing well, placing some more water and fertilizer in the ground may help your plant recover. Platelets are like fertilizer, their growth factors help rev up the local repair response. So PRP is generally good for helping things that may either heal on their own (given enough time) or are maybe stuck in the healing process and need a little "kick" to get things going towards resolution. While PRP may help recruit a few stem cells to the area, stem cell injection therapy is much more advanced.
For orthopedics in particular, if PRP is like adding additional fertilizer and water to the plant, mesenchymal stem cells (MSC's) are like placing new seeds in the area and hiring a gardener.
MSC's are capable of not only differentiating into the new tissue that is lost, but also coordinating the repair response (so the seeds and the gardener). So MSC therapy would be more appropriate for degenerative diseases where there is lost tissue (like chronic arthritis, a partial tendon or ligament tear, a low back disc where there are torn fibers allowing the disc to bulge). In addition, the lab prep for MSC therapy is much more complex than PRP. While PRP can be made in a simple bedside centrifuge, MSC's are isolated from fat.
The upshot: PRP is great to kick start a healing process that may be stuck, MSC's and other stem cell approaches will likely rule the day in regenerative medicine.