To move around, your body relies on 4,000 tendons — strong connective tissues that attach bones to muscles. If one is damaged, not only is your mobility affected, but you also have to deal with the pain and discomfort that often accompanies tendon injuries.
When it comes to tendon damage, the sports medicine team at No Mercy Sports Medicine, which is led by Dr. Moisés Irizarry-Román, has had good success with a form of regenerative medicine called platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy.
Let’s take a look at how this innovative approach provides your damaged tendon with the resources it needs to heal quickly and strongly.
There are many different types of musculoskeletal injuries, and tendon damage ranks among the more common. As we mentioned, these connective tissues attach bones to muscles in your body, enabling movement, so it’s hardly surprising that these tissues are also in the line of fire when it comes to damage.
Many different issues can develop in your tendons, such as:
Now that you know the different types of tendon damage, here are some of the more common tendon injuries:
What all of these tendon issues have in common is that PRP therapy can play an invaluable role in the healing process.
PRP is a form of regenerative medicine, which means we’re tapping regenerative resources that already exist in your own body. With PRP therapy, we draw a sample of your blood and then separate out the platelets and plasma from other blood components, creating a concentrate that we inject into your damaged tendon.
The reason we do this is that your platelets are the cell fragments that kick off the wound-healing cascade in your body, which starts with controlling bleeding and ends with tissue remodeling. When we deliver extra platelets to your damaged tissues through PRP therapy, our goal is to increase the growth factor activity to stimulate cell proliferation.
Another benefit of PRP therapy is that we introduce cytokines to control inflammation, which can reduce your pain.
How well does PRP therapy work to heal tendon damage? Targeted studies show real results. In one, 230 patients with tennis elbow received PRP injections; after 24 weeks, 84% reported a 25% or greater reduction in pain, as compared to 68% in the control group.
Another meta-analysis of 21 studies on the effects of PRP injections for tennis elbow and rotator cuff injuries concluded that PRP therapy may help in the effort to reduce pain.
At No Mercy Sports Medicine, our own experiences using PRP therapy for tendon issues reflects these positive results. PRP is a great solution for tendon injuries, and we’ve been able to help patients to heal faster and find much-needed pain relief.
To find out whether PRP therapy should be a part of the treatment plan for your tendon issues, we invite you to contact our office in Miami, Florida, by calling 305-614-6757.
