The study, which was published in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine, used PRP injections produced from the patient’s own blood to deliver a high concentration of potentially healing-enhancing growth factors to the patient’s cartilage. Brian Halpern, MD, chief of the Primary Care Sports Medicine Service at the Hospital for Special Surgery, New York City, and lead author of the study, explained, ‘You take a person’s blood, you spin it down, you concentrate the platelets, and you inject a person’s knee with their own platelets in a concentrated form. This then activates growth factors and stem cells to help repair the tissue, if possible, calm osteoarthritis symptoms and decrease inflammation.’
According to Hollis Potter, MD, chief of the Division of Magnetic Resonance Imaging at the Hospital for Special Surgery, and another author of the study, the researchers used many methods to evaluate OA improvement, including MRI assessment, to ensure the validity of the results. ‘The problem with a lot of the PRP studies is that most people have just used subjective outcome instruments, such as pain and function scores,’ she said. ‘When you add MRI assessment, it shows you the status of the disease at that time, regardless of whether the patient is symptomatic or asymptomatic or they have good or poor function in the knee.’
Halpern explained, ‘The knee can be divided into three compartments, the medial compartment, the lateral compartment and the patellofemoral compartment. If we look at these compartments individually, which we did, in at least 73% of these cases, there was no progression of arthritis per compartment at one year. That is very significant, because longitudinal studies suggest a four to six percent progression of arthritis at one year.’
He added that the study is a small case series and PRP needs to be compared to traditional treatments in a larger, randomised, control trial. However, he concluded, ‘We are entering into an era of biologic treatment, which is incredibly ideal, where you can use your own cells to try to help repair your other cells, rather than using a substance that is artificial. The downside is next to zero and the upside is huge.’