The Role of Platelet-Rich Plasma in Healing Lower Leg Wounds

Did you know that, at any given time in the United States, about 6.5 million Americans are living with a chronic wound? Or that, if you have diabetes, your risk for a slow-healing wound is much higher as one-third of people with the disease develop a diabetic foot ulcer?

However you came to have a chronic wound in your lower leg, the issue is a clear and present danger that can lead to amputation if the healing isn’t going in the right direction.

As foot, ankle, and leg wound experts, the team at Foot Ankle Leg Wound Care Orange County, led by double board-certified wound specialist Dr. Thomas Rambacher, is dedicated to preventing amputation. One of the many weapons in our wound-healing arsenal is platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy.

Here’s how this innovative and regenerative treatment can benefit your lower leg wound.

When your wound won’t heal

Under normal circumstances, your body has a powerful healing system built right in and this system jumps into action anytime there’s damage. By jumping in, we’re referring to a four-stage healing process that includes:

Stasis
Inflammation
Cell proliferation
Strengthening and remodeling

When you have a chronic wound, it can’t get out of the second stage — inflammation — and this stall in healing allows bacteria to invade the wound and cause infection. Since your body is already struggling to heal the wound, you can imagine that it’s going to struggle to fight off infection.

The reasons behind this sluggish healing and most chronic lower leg wounds often come down to these two factors:

Peripheral neuropathy (nerve damage)
Poor circulation in and out of your lower limbs

Without good nerve health, you might not be aware of a brewing problem and, when you do become aware, poor circulation prevents healing resources from getting in there.

Who is in the line of fire for chronic wounds?

Chronic wounds often co-occur with certain health issues, such as diabetes — about half of people with diabetes develop nerve damage in their lower legs. Aside from diabetes, chronic wounds also develop in people with peripheral artery disease (PAD), obesity, and in people who are older, as age can slow down healing.

Supporting healing with PRP therapy

Now let’s go back to our discussion about the four-step wound healing cascade, which is first initiated by the platelets in your blood. These platelets come together to form a plug when there’s bleeding, but their contribution doesn’t end there.

Platelets also release proteins called growth factors that kick off a cell signaling process that calls on regenerative resources in your body, such as stem cells. Platelets also release cytokines and chemokines that regulate the inflammatory process.

As you can see, platelets play a key role in the initial phases of healing, which is why we turn to them for help. With PRP therapy, we harvest platelets from your blood, create a concentrate, and then we inject the PRP into your chronic wound to deliver regenerative and healing tools to the wound when your body is struggling to do so.

To give you an idea about how successful PRP therapy can be in supporting healing in chronic wounds, one study found that, “All the patients showed signs of wound healing with reduction in wound size.”

Our own experiences mirror these findings, which is why we often include PRP therapy as part of our baseline chronic wound care.

If you’d like to explore whether PRP therapy can push your chronic wound or ulcer in the right direction, we invite you to call our office in Mission Viejo, California, at 949-832-6018 or request an appointment online today.