The Benefits of PRP for Sports Injuries

Your active life is important to you, so when you’re sidelined by a musculoskeletal injury you’re especially frustrated. From low back/neck pain to knee/hip/shoulder/elbow pain, sports injuries can affect you from head to toe, keeping you on the bench and out of the game.

To combat common sports injuries, the physicians at Apex Pain Specialists — Dr. Maziar Massrour and Dr. Naveen Reddy — offer platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy, which is a regenerative form of medicine that’s becoming a favorite among athletes.

Here's a look at some of the many benefits of PRP for sports injuries to help you figure out whether it might play a role in getting you back in the game.

PRP works with your body to heal

When your body is injured, it launches a wound-healing cascade that starts with your platelets. These flat cells are not only responsible for staunching bleeding, if there is any, but they also release growth factors that start the rebuilding and repair processes.

Growth factors are proteins that encourage cell proliferation and differentiation and they call on additional resources, such as stem cells. Your platelets also release cytokines, which are proteins that control inflammation, an important part of the healing process.

With PRP therapy, we harvest platelets from your own blood to create a concentrate that we inject into your damaged tissues. This PRP amplifies the natural healing process in your body to speed up the rebuilding and repair.

PRP works well on most sports injuries

There are any number of ways that athletes injure themselves. For example, rotator cuff tears send about 2 million people in the United States to the doctor’s office. Going down to your feet, plantar fasciitis accounts for about 10% of injuries in runners.

Another study followed participants at a sports center for eight years and reported that tendon issues accounted for 22% of injuries among its athletes.

What each of these issues has in common is that they can benefit from PRP therapy. This approach to healing works especially well with connective tissues such as tendons, ligaments, and muscles. So, whether you’re dealing with a golfer's elbow or a runner’s knee, the odds are good that PRP therapy can help you move again without pain and limitations.

PRP therapy is safe

Since the platelets come from your own body, PRP treatments are quite safe. In fact, the only adverse effects might be some minor bruising around the injection sites.

PRP can help you avoid surgery

You’ve already been sidelined by your sports injury, so the idea of surgery extending your stay on the bench is not one you relish. Between PRP and physical therapy, we’ve helped many of our patients avoid surgery and, instead, help their tissues to heal on a cellular level using the body’s own powerful resources.

If the information above has piqued your interest and you’d like to explore whether PRP therapy can play a role in your recovery from a sports injury, please call our office in Chandler, Arizona, at 480-820-7246 or book an appointment online today.