The Power of Platelets
Your blood contains four main ingredients: red and white blood cells, platelets, and plasma. The platelets are largely responsible for clotting your blood and initiating the healing process any time you’re injured. Fueling the healing response are the growth factors and other proteins found in your platelets, which are released at the site of the damage in order to aid in healing, help with repairs, and reduce inflammation, all at a cellular level.
Harvesting This Power
To tap this amazing resource, many medical fields have turned to platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy, which is a technique in which they isolate the platelets in your blood, create a concentrate, and then inject it into your damaged tissue along with your plasma.
PRF refines this process one step further with a fibrin meshwork that contains your platelets and growth factors, which we place in the area of your dental work to encourage faster healing. The primary advantage to PRF is that we don’t alter your blood in any way. Instead, we simply take a sample of your blood, put it into a centrifuge, which separates it into three layers:
• Plasma
• Fibrin clot, which contains the platelets
• Red blood cells
With PRF, we use the gelatinous fibrin clot to create a resorbable membrane, which we place over the site where we’ve performed a dental procedure.
Because we don’t change the biochemistry of your blood in any way, we allow these resources to do what they do best, naturally, and in one single step.
Platelet Power At Work
Whether you’ve had a periodontal or other dental procedure, we can use PRF to reduce any swelling in your tissue and encourage faster healing in both your soft and hard tissues. The mesh that we place at the site of your dental work gradually releases critical growth factors that provide support for your cells in their mission to rebuild and regenerate.
The PRF technique is especially valuable if we’re performing any surgery on your gums to halt or reverse periodontal disease. When we remove any damaged tissue, including bone, the goal is to encourage this area to heal as quickly as possible, while also regenerating healthy tissue. PRF’s ability to aid in both has been a valuable boost in our oral surgeries.
And you win by having a reduced healing time, getting you on the road to better dental health more quickly.
If you’d like to explore how PRF can help you, please give us a call or use the online scheduling tool to set up an appointment.