A shoulder surgeon explains how platelet-rich plasma (PRP) cuts rotator cuff retear risk from 25% down to 12%. PRP is made by spinning down a patient's own blood to concentrate growth factors, then applying it during repair. The benefit grows larger with bigger tears.
Platelet-rich plasma is where you take blood off your own body, you spin it down, you get the growth factor-rich area. Although there was some early adoption of PRP, it kind of fell off. But when you really look at the data critically, actually PRP does reduce failure of healing and actually reduces that by about 50%. So if you think about that, if somebody has on average a 25% risk of retear or failure of healing, which was— really should be called, you may be able to reduce that down to about 12%, for instance. It's also been shown to potentially improve pain, that is lower pain after surgery, and improve functional outcomes. Now, those differences are really, really small, but that's also probably because most of these studies look at 2-year outcomes. And remember earlier I talked about the fact that really you start to see worsening of outcomes over time. So the idea there is that if you can improve healing, you're trying to set yourself up for a better long-term outcome. And this effect of PRP gets more dramatic the larger the tear gets. So for me personally, as a shoulder surgeon, if I had a rotator cuff repair, I would 100% have PRP, no doubt. And especially if it's a larger tear, I would really encourage somebody to do it. But I offer it to all my patients.
