Effectiveness of Platelet-Rich Plasma for Knee Osteoarthritis

By Farhan Malik, MD
Atlanta Innovative Medicine 

If you are suffering from osteoarthritis (OA), you are not alone. OA is one of the most common forms of arthritis, affecting 23% of the adult population. Those who experience the pain it causes know and understand how difficult it can be to manage.

Osteoarthritis occurs when cartilage—the tissue that cushions the bones within a joint—wears away, resulting in “bone on bone” contact. The stiffness and pain makes it difficult for those affected to walk, climb, get in and out of chairs and bathtubs—and, for active older adults, to play sports.

Current Treatment Options

There is presently no cure for OA and it can be challenging to treat. Safe, effective and nonsurgical treatment methods are needed, but most options only temporarily relieve pain.

Today’s current OA treatment focuses on ways to manage symptoms and slow down the degenerative process, typically involving activity modification to help relieve pain and stiffness, and buying time before an entire joint replacement. While joint replacements can be effective in treating late stages of OA, it is not suitable for earlier and moderate stages. And surgery is also not 100% effective, with many patients experiencing chronic pain after the operation and recovery period.

Additional Treatments Include:

• Elevation and Icing
• Exercise
• Weight Loss
• Physical Therapy
• Topical Anti-Inflammatory Gels
• Oral Non-Steroid Anti-Inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs)
• Injection Therapies (including steroids such as Cortisone)

Limitations of Exercise, NSAIDs, and Injection Therapies

While they are often effective, the continued use of Non-Steroid Anti-Inflammatory Drugs (NSAID) can potentially lead to severe side effects that limit their usefulness. This makes NSAIDs a poor option for long-term treatment plans. Though it is a common treatment approach, cortisone shots and physical therapy don’t always help, or may lose their effectiveness over time.

Exercise has arguably been one of the first treatments encouraged for those with OA, this can be hard to follow up with, especially if the patient is experiencing pain. One study shows that OA patients with a treatment plan of a PRP injection with an exercise program reported less pain than those that did not receive a PRP injection and only relied on exercise.

Based on the published science and our extensive clinical experience at Atlanta Innovative Medicine, PRP injections can greatly improve the efficacy of exercise and aid in recovery.

Why Consider PRP for Knee Osteoarthritis?

Today many health care professionals are recommending platelet-rich plasma (PRP) as a highly effective treatment option. So what exactly is PRP?

PRP is a growing practice of regenerative medicine. Simply put, it is an injection made up of a concentration of the patient’s own plasma, collected from a small blood sample. This concentrated plasma product contains nearly nine times the concentration of platelets of one’s normal blood.