PRP: A Game-changer for Arthritic Joints

Arthritis is frustrating on many levels — the pain, the stiffness, the limitations on your life. If you’re familiar with this frustration, you’re not alone. In fact, more than 92 million people in the United States have doctor-diagnosed arthritis or arthritis-like symptoms.

What the team here at Apex Pain Specialists wants you to know is that there are solutions for restoring health to your damaged joints in the form of regenerative medicine, including platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy. Under the direction of our board-certified pain management specialists, Dr. Maziar Massrour and Dr. Naveen Reddy, we’re helping our patients get back to lives that aren’t overshadowed by arthritis.

Here’s a look at why PRP therapy is being hailed as a game-changer for people with arthritic joints.

Behind regenerative medicine

Much of modern medicine is based on interventional therapies that rely on outside sources to restore health, such as replacing a joint or receiving injections to quell pain and inflammation.

Regenerative medicine works from the inside out. The goal of regenerative medicine is to redirect and amplify the considerable resources already found in the human body to repair and rebuild specific damaged tissues.

This approach to healing is especially important when it comes to conditions like osteoarthritis (OA), which can lead to irreparable damage inside your joints. At the heart of OA is the breakdown of your cartilage, which doesn’t contain any blood vessels. This means the tissue doesn’t have access to regenerative resources in your body. Through regenerative medicine practices like PRP therapy, we deliver those resources.

The basics of PRP therapy

Your blood contains four ingredients:

1. Red blood cells
2. White blood cells
3. Platelets
4. Plasma

Your platelets are primarily responsible for clotting your blood and preventing you from bleeding out. Once the threat of bleeding is over, your platelets then initiate the wound healing process by releasing growth factors. As their name implies, growth factors are molecules that encourage cell proliferation by transmitting growth signals.

PRP harnesses the power of your platelets and growth factors. With PRP, we draw a sample of your blood, isolate the platelets, and then inject a concentrate of these powerful regenerative cells directly into your damaged tissues. The platelets then get straight to work helping to generate new tissue.

The benefits of PRP therapy

For people with arthritic joints, PRP therapy offers a number of benefits, including the following:

• It’s safe, because your body will readily accepts its own resources
• It may help you avoid more invasive options, such as surgery
• It helps rebuild your joint instead of just treat the arthritis symptoms
• It provides longer-lasting results than medications and injections

If you’re worried about a long road to pain-free movement with PRP therapy, there’s more good news. Most people realize results fairly quickly, often within weeks. And these results continue as you progress through the therapy and your cartilage rebuilds and the inflammation subsides.

If you prefer the idea of addressing the underlying arthritis rather than just finding ways to work around the problem and its symptoms, PRP is an exceptional option.

To explore whether PRP therapy can help with your arthritic joints, we invite you to call our office in Chandler, Arizona, at 480-820-7246 or book an appointment online.