How Regenerative Medicine Can Help with Neuropathy

Damage to the nerves outside your central nervous system — peripheral neuropathy — is a common problem in the United States. Up to half of people with diabetes, for example, experience some degree of nerve damage, thanks to unregulated glucose levels in their blood.

No matter how your nerves become damaged, the road to regeneration can be long and uncomfortable, and you want to find a way to speed up this process.

The team here at Valiant Life Medical offers such a treatment in the form of regenerative medicine, more specifically, platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy.

What causes peripheral neuropathy?

As we mentioned, one of the leading causes of peripheral neuropathy in the US is diabetes, but there are other reasons why your nerves can become damaged, including:

• Direct injury to the nerves
• Infections
• Entrapment issues (such as carpal tunnel syndrome)
• Cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy and radiation
• Excessive alcohol use

Whatever is behind your peripheral neuropathy, nerves can regenerate, but the process can be long. Unfortunately, if you have a chronic condition that leads to neuropathy, your body may not be able to keep up with the nerve damage so the condition can become progressive and irreversible.

The role of platelets in nerve regeneration

Platelets are cells in your blood that play a crucial role in your body’s natural healing response. When you incur an injury, your platelets first ensure that you don’t bleed out by quickly plugging any breeches in your blood vessels.

Once your platelets take care of the immediate bleeding threat, they release growth factors which initiate a wound-healing cascade. These growth factors call upon regenerative resources in your body and control inflammation responses.

With PRP therapy, we create a concentrate of your own platelets and introduce them into areas that need additional resources for optimal healing. The orthopedic world has been turning to PRP therapy for years to aid in musculoskeletal damage, but its applications are much broader and include peripheral neuropathy.

PRP therapy is backed by research

When we inject PRP into damaged nerves, we can not only speed up the repair processes in your damaged nerves, but we can also reduce pain. For example, one study explains that through PRP therapy, scaffolds and bridges can be created that fill in nerve gaps or wrap damaged nerve ends, leading to “significant neurological recovery and pain reduction.”

Another study among 52 patients with carpal tunnel syndrome compared PRP therapy to an injection of dextrose (a form of sugar). They found that a single dose of PRP was significantly more effective at addressing the nerve compression at the three- and six-month marks than the dextrose.

These are just two of many studies that support the use of PRP in nerve regeneration, which is why PRP therapy has become a frontline treatment for peripheral neuropathy at our practice.

If you’re struggling with neuropathy and you’d like to explore whether PRP therapy can help, we invite you to contact our office in Fort Worth, Texas, to set up a consultation.