Platelet Rich Plasma Therapy in Fresno
Enhanced Healing With the Use of Platelet Rich Plasma and Platelet Rich Fibrin
What is platelet rich plasma and platelet rich fibrin, and why do you recommend their use?
This question might best be answered by another question…..one that we ask our patients that are planning to have a tooth extraction, wisdom tooth extraction, implants, bone grafting or gum grafting procedures with us.
The question is this:
If you could do something that was scientifically proven to enhance your body’s own healing and regeneration systems, that would decrease your chances of having postoperative complications and help attain better healing and better results for your dental surgery, that was safe and did not require any medicines, chemicals, or donor cells other than having a small amount of your own blood drawn, and that was relatively inexpensive-would you want to do that?
It sounds almost too good to be true, and yet this could serve as a description and rationale of the use of platelet-rich plasma and platelet rich fibrin in our practice.
Platelet-rich plasma is a liquid form, and platelet-rich fibrin is a gelled membrane form of the products that we make from a small quantity of blood that we take from the patient just before their dental procedure.
This blood is drawn in test tubes and then spun in a centrifuge which separates the blood into its individual components:
1. Plasma
2. Red blood cells
3. A small but very concentrated quality of white blood cells and platelets called the buffy coat. It’s this buffy coat layer that contains the healing and growth factors that we use to enhance healing.
These products, processed from your own blood are then immediately placed into the surgical site. The scientifically proven positive effects of this procedure include better and faster soft tissue (gums) and hard tissue (bone) healing and regeneration. Because the healing occurs faster than usual, there is less chance of infection, dry socket, failed implants or failed to graft. These procedures are especially helpful to those who otherwise might have impaired healing such as diabetics, smokers, and others with chronic or acute conditions which can interfere with healing.
Is this procedure new to dentistry?
Platelet-rich plasma and platelet-rich fibrin have been used for over 10 years, with notable benefits to our patients. The procedure is widely used in medicine for such things as heart surgery, orthopedic, oral and maxillofacial surgery, plastic surgery, dermatology…..just to name a few. It has not been widely used in dentistry in practices such as ours, even though it has been proven effective, because of the time and cost of delivering this service. For example, the most commonly used techniques for using this treatment might cost the surgeon $200 or even much more, depending on the setting, just for the disposable processing materials used. This does not include the surgeon’s or his assistant’s time. Because the procedure we use is much simpler and much less expensive to perform, we can pass these savings on to our patients. Research has shown that our procedure is probably more effective in concentrating growth factors than many of the other more expensive techniques.
Want to know more?
We understand that many of our patients who are just curious want to know more about the science behind these techniques. There has been much research and there are many hundreds of articles in the scientific literature supporting the use of PRP and PRF, including 2 articles in the Journal of Oral Implantology.
Furthermore, for dental or medical professionals who would like to learn more about our techniques in order to offer these procedures to their patients, we teach courses that include this topic through the American Academy of Implant Dentistry and through the Clarion Research Group. Please call our office for more information, or email Dr. Davis at markdavisdds@gmail.com
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